During the Russian Navy's infamous defeat at the Battle of Tsushima against Japan, an explosion on board the Borodino - slightly smaller than the Moskva - saw all-but one of her 855 crew killed. The figure, while unconfirmed, is consistent with losses suffered on exploding warships. Meanwhile Ilya Ponomarev, a politician exiled from Russia for opposing Putin's 2014 annexation of Crimea, said just 58 of the 510-strong crew have since been accounted for - raising the prospect that 452 men went down with the ship in what would be a bitter loss for Vladimir Putin's already beleaguered army. 'Where are these warheads? Where were they when the ammunition exploded,' he asked. 'On board the Moskva could be nuclear warheads - two units,' Samus said, while Klymenko called on other Black Sea nations - Turkey, Romania, Georgia, and Bulgaria - to insist on an explanation.
If true, the loss of the warheads into the Black Sea could spark a 'Broken Arrow' incident - American military slang for potentially lethal accidents involving nuclear weapons. Today, Mykhailo Samus, director of a Lviv-based military think-tank Andriy Klymenko, editor of Black Sea News and Ukrainian newspaper Defence Express all warned that the Moskva could have been carrying two nuclear warheads designed to be fitted to its P-1000 'carrier killer' missiles.
The Moskva, a Soviet-era guided missile cruiser, sank near the port of Sevastopol on Thursday after Ukraine said it hit the ship with two cruise missiles. Russia's Black Sea flagship which sank yesterday after an explosion on board may have been carrying nuclear warheads, analysts and experts have warned today, as a Russian politician said more than 400 sailors could have gone down with the ship.
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