Blackcap Blog

Published at 10:41 on 15 April 2022

No, I am not just blindly taking Ukraine’s assertion on it:

1. The Russian claim that a fire broke out and it had to be abandoned just doesn’t make much sense. Nobody just abandons a ship, particularly a prize asset like the Moskva, because a fire breaks out. They try and fight the fire. If they couldn’t, this points to crew incompetence that is even more embarrassing than a missile strike.
2. The Russians don’t even believe their own claim. Just look at this anthology of how the Russian state media is screeching in outrage at Ukraine over the sinking. Why all the outrage at Ukraine if Ukraine had nothing to do with it?
3. The US Department of Defense has concluded, based on the available intelligence, that Ukranian missiles were responsible for the sinking.

Simply all of the best available evidence is pointing to it being a successful Ukrainian attack.

And it is a major loss for Russia. The Moskva was the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. This is the largest deliberate sinking of a ship since World War II. Large ships are not built overnight; it will take many years to complete constructing a replacement. In the meantime, Russia is not able to move a replacement into the theatre of combat from one of their other fleets because Turkey has closed the Bosporus to Russian warships.