At the bottom of the Black Sea lie 12,000 tons of steel and a bit of Russian national pride. The Kremlin confirmed on Thursday that Moskva, its flagship in the region, sank while en route to Sevastopol for repairs. If Moscow and kyiv give different reasons to explain the damage, “the loss is a blow for the Kremlin”, comment the Republic. “Hard blow”an expression taken up by other newspapers around the world.
“Vessels operate far from the public eye and their activity is rarely talked about in the press. But they are floating pieces of national territory, and when you lose one, especially a flagship, the political and symbolic message – in addition to the military loss – is all the more noticeable”explains to CNN Alessio Patalano, a professor of military strategy at King’s College London. All the more remarkable since the 186-meter cruiser would be the second boat destroyed since the start of the Russian invasion and even “the largest ship to be sunk by the enemy since World War II”according to BBC.
All this on the condition that the Ukrainian version – the impact of one of its Neptune missiles – is the correct one. But experts find it more believable, says the Washington Post, that the Russian explanation, the explosion of ammunition on board. Fifty days after the first Russian offensives, it would therefore be a “powerful symbolic victory for the Ukrainian army, an embarrassment for Moscow and a demonstration of the power that new weapons have to influence war”summarizes the New York Times.
To give an idea of the importance of the Moskva, commissioned in the early eighties, in the Russian collective imagination, The country points out that he “made headlines in the Russian press as the aircraft carrier killer” and that “a simple change of course to get to the Mediterranean justified writing a few lines”.
Le Sun has fun with what he calls “the greatest naval disaster since Belgrano”. He titles “Gotcha” (we got you), as he had done during the Falklands War, when the Belgrano, an Argentinian cruiser, was sunk by the British. The tabloid describes a “aging warship”an example of a “squeaky navy and dated […] relying on ships built in the last days of the Soviet Union”.
But beyond the symbol, The world speaks of a potential “turning point of the war” and a shipwreck that “will go down in the history of naval warfare”. The German daily also reports “that Russia can no longer bring warships into the Black Sea via the Mediterranean because Turkey has blocked the passage of Russian warships through the Bosphorus”.
The Republic also considers that the threat of a landing in Odessa has temporarily disappeared. “Elite troops could now reach the front, support the offensive against the Russians in Kherson or reinforce the line that protects the Donbass from the announced attack of the invaders”analyzes the log.