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When Putin finally visited the closed military city that served as the Kursk’s home port and spoke to a hall packed with bereaved relatives a full 10 days after the catastrophe, he put the blame on Russia’s economic and military decline over the previous decade – before he came to power - and denounced the TV channels that had slammed his fumbled response. But he did not want them to uncover that everyone was dead, and so he just refused the help - which, of course, made everything worse.” “The Norwegians and others were calling in with offers of help.
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“He didn’t know how to deal with it, and therefore he tried to avoid dealing with it,” Belton quotes the former Putin ally as saying.
He put the blame on Russia’s economic and military decline - before he came to power. Putin answers questions from the relatives of those who died when the Kursk sank in the northern town of Vidyayevo on August 22, 2000.
Putin acted "dishonorably" after news of the tragedy emerged, Gudkov said, and subsequently has sought to ensure that the episode, and its fallout, gradually slip from people’s minds. Petersburg official Aleksandr Rzhanenkov told a press conference on August 10.Īt least six other cities announced commemorative events.īut despite its role as a defining moment for Russia’s political trajectory under Putin, the episode that marked the first major challenge of his presidency has in some ways faded from collective memory amid its continued exclusion from state TV reports and official statements.Ī survey conducted by the Levada Center pollster in 2015 - to coincide with the 15th anniversary of the catastrophe - found that the proportion of Russians who believed the authorities had failed in their response had more than halved, a phenomenon that Levada’s Director Lev Gudkov attributed at the time to a lack of official coverage of this and other tragedies in which authorities are seen as complicit. We want all our residents, and all Russians, to once again return to those events,” St. “Our main task today is to remember our heroes, remember the commander, and remember the crew. The Kursk nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea near Severomorsk in 1999 Petersburg, the names of all 118 crew members will be recited at a church service before a flower-laying ceremony at a local cemetery where 23 of them lie buried. On August 12, Russia is marking the 20th anniversary of the Kursk’s sinking with low-key ceremonies. Two decades on, a catastrophe that reshaped Russia’s political system remains shrouded in mystery, compounded by the effects of the cover-up that followed it. It wasn’t until nine days after the incident, on August 21, that a team of British and Norwegian divers accessed the vessel and found its entire crew dead. In the submarine wreck, the 23 men barricaded themselves in a flooded rear compartment and awaited a rescue that never came. President Vladimir Putin, then just over three months into his first Kremlin term, continued vacationing on the Black Sea and made no statement about the Kursk for more than a week until his reluctant return to Moscow. The blast was picked up on seismographs across Europe, but the Russian Navy made no public acknowledgement of the catastrophe. Not long after departure, one of the torpedoes on board the vessel exploded in its hatch, killing most of the 118 crew members and sending the wreck, along with 23 survivors, hurtling to the seafloor. MOSCOW - In August 2000, the nuclear submarine Kursk left a port above Russia’s Arctic Circle for naval exercises on the Barents Sea.
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