Russia acknowledged for the first time that a Ukrainian missile sank its prized Black Sea flagship, then deleted the statement and returned to the official narrative, saying the sinking of the guided-missile cruiser Moskva was a freak accident.
Moskva, one of Russia’s most important warships, sank in April 2022, just seven weeks after Moscow launched an unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Kiev soon claimed it hit the ship with a Neptune anti-ship cruise missile, but Russia offered a different version of the incident.
The Russian Defense Ministry has always maintained that the Moskva sank after a fire broke out, causing ammunition on board to explode. The Russian military said at the time that the warship’s crew had been evacuated, but later admitted that some people were missing.
A Moscow military court last week inadvertently corrected the Kremlin’s official version, according to independent Russian news outlet Mediazona. Mediazona said the court issued a statement on the sentence of a Ukrainian naval commander who ordered the attack on the Moskva and another ship, the frigate Admiral Essen. He was sentenced in absentia to life in prison, according to the court.
The statement was quickly removed from the court’s website, but not before Mediazona successfully downloaded it.
The loss of Moskva was extremely embarrassing for Russia and was one of Ukraine’s most significant victories in the war to date.
CNN asked Russian authorities about the apparent backsliding. Irina Zirnova, a spokesperson for the Second Military Court of the Western District, which would have released the now-deleted statement, said she would not comment. The Russian military did not respond to CNN’s request.
Mediazona has extensively reported on the sinking of the Moskva and published testimonies from the families of the sailors who died, whose deaths have never been officially acknowledged by the Russian military.
“On April 13, 2022, two missiles struck the Moscow Guard guided missile cruiser, causing fire and smoke inside the ship,” the court said in a statement, Mediazona reported.
“The explosion, fire and smoke resulted in the death of 20 cruiser crew members, 24 others injured to varying degrees and eight missing, including during a more than six-hour battle for the ship’s survival,” the statement said, adding that the ship “had no involvement” in Russian operations in Ukraine, Mediazona reported.
When asked by CNN, Ukrainian Navy spokesman Dmytro Pletenchuk said that it would be difficult for Russia to deny the fact of the sinking, especially considering that the families of the crew of the Moskva have been speaking out.
tightly controlled narrative
The court’s reversal of the statement is just the latest propaganda failure for Russian authorities.
Early in the invasion, Russia’s state news agency RIA Novosti published an editorial that prematurely celebrated Russia’s victory in the war, then quickly deleted it. Nearly four years later, Russian forces continue to struggle on the front lines, gaining more and more territory at great cost, while Ukraine has managed to recapture large swathes of territory that Moscow initially invaded.
The Russian military and the Kremlin have exercised extremely tight control over the narrative about Russia’s war in Ukraine, even refusing to call the conflict a “war,” instead calling it a Russian “special military operation.”
Many journalists reporting on the facts on the ground, including those documenting massacres carried out by Russian soldiers in Bucha and elsewhere, have been imprisoned for spreading “disinformation” about Russian troops.
The Committee to Protect Journalists said in December that at least 27 journalists had been imprisoned on criminal charges related to their reporting since Russia launched its sweeping invasion. The committee said four people had been released, two had been exiled and one had been killed. The rest remain in prison.
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