It's 20 years since Kursk submarine disaster, here's how 118 people died during Putin's first year as president
August 12 marks a black day in the history of Russia’s military. It was on this day two decades ago that one of the country’s nuclear submarines Kursk sank to the bottom of the Barents Sea with the entire crew on board. All 118 crew members were found dead and the actual reason for the accident remains unknown till date though the Russian authorities said the explosion of a torpedo was the likely cause.
What happened on August 12, 2000?
Kursk, a 1994-made nuclear-powered Oscar II-class submarine, left the port on August 10 to participate in a drill with the Russian military. Ships, planes and submarines got together up in the Barents Sea, which is above the Arctic Circle for the war games. On August 12 morning, the submarine was supposed to fire a practice torpedo. But before it happened, two explosions took place in the front hull of the underwater vessel, sinking it to the bottom of the cold sea.
Kursk was a mammoth submarine measuring 500 feet in length and weighing 24,000 tons. It featured two nuclear reactors and could attain a speed of 28 knots. It was the largest attack submarine in the world at the time, nearly three times the size of its largest counterparts in the US Navy.
How did the rescue efforts go?
With 118 crew members’ lives in danger, several countries offered help to Moscow to save their lives but the latter refused all assistance. The rescue team reached the ill-fated submarine a week later but it was far too late by then. Vladimir Putin, who had taken over the presidency only a few months ago, agreed to lift the submarine from the sea for a probe but it was a herculean task, given the massive size of the vessel and the inclement natural conditions. A whopping $100M was spent and with the best-available technology then, Kursk was raised in October 2001, more than a year after it sank. The operation lasted 15 hours and a Dutch-led international consortium pulled the damaged submarine to a giant barge to get it transported to a dry dock. However, as History.com reported, the rescue team was forced to cut off the vessel’s front hull from the rest of the body to facilitate the lifting process, leaving the best evidence of what caused the blasts under the sea.
Speculations over Kursk disaster
While Russia officially concluded that a torpedo explosion made the vessel sink, it also acknowledged afterwards that the liquid fuel that it has been using in its missiles was known to be unstable in some conditions. As the submarine operators were trying to bring it to the surface, a second explosion hit it — a much bigger one and suspected to be another warhead — that erased whatever chances the ill-fated crew had to survive. Britannica said this explanation was corroborated by reports of two underwater explosions that were picked by western agencies monitoring the area at the time. The vessel’s damaged remains also hinted at something similar when they were brought up from the sea level. There were other allegations that the vessel sank after colliding with a foreign vessel or that the crew members were inexperienced and incompetent to handle the torpedo.
What reactions did the Putin administration face?
Putin, who had taken over as the president in May 2000 replacing Boris Yeltsin, the first president of Russia after the fall of the USSR, faced a hostile public reaction. The families of the victims called the official inquiry a hogwash. Putin, then 48, was on a vacation in Sochi on Black Sea at the time of the disaster and didn’t return immediately. He authorized acceptance of help from countries like Norway and Britain only after five days went by and visited the site himself after nine days. Putin went to the naval garrison of Vidyayevo in the Arctic Circle in late August where he faced the fury of the widows and kin of the 118 soldiers who perished in the disaster.
He had also visited the closed naval base of Severomorsk outside Murmansk but the media was kept away so that the president did not get any more negative publicity. Moscow was also criticized after Norway first declared that Kursk was lost and the Scandinavian country’s sailors scattered wreaths on the Barents Sea as a mark of respect to the dead Russian sailors before returning home. Putin later said publicly that he felt a complete sense of responsibility and guilt for the tragedy.
The victims’ kin were not convinced, however. Yekaterina Bagryantseva, widow of Kursk’s captain Vladimir Bagryantseva, the submarine’s most senior officer to die, accused the administration of treating the victims’ families callously. "Putin has got nothing to say to us. He can't bring my husband back," she was quoted as saying by the Guardian in Murmansk. "Officers have told us there are still people alive down there. The first and the ninth sections (of the submarine) are flooded, but the other sections are not. The officials are lying. None of us believes them. They just don't want to save them because they don't have the money. They don't even have the money to pay the Norwegian divers. Russians are strong and so are our boys. They're still alive, but the government doesn't want any witnesses to this tragedy. It wants them dead," she added.
In 2018, Putin said during an interview with Sputnik that the Kursk disaster was not too surprising given the state of Russia’s armed forces at the time but regretted the tragedy that claimed so many lives.
Films like ‘K-19: The Widowmaker’ (2002) and ‘The Command’ (2018) were made in later years based on the story of Kursk.