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Six bodies recovered during search for missing marines from sunken Thai warship | Thailand
Thailand’s navy has discovered the bodies of six marines after a small warship sank in the Gulf of Thailand. One marine was rescued alive on Monday as the military mobilised helicopters, warships and unmanned drones off its central coast.
Twenty-three people remained unaccounted for after the HTMS Sukhothai was knocked over by four-metre waves and strong winds late on Sunday. Some were without life vests.
“The latest person was found 41 hours from when the ship sank and he was alive. So we believe that there are those still alive out there … we will continue to search,” said Admiral Chonlathis Navanugraha, the navy’s chief of staff.
Helicopters, two unmanned surveillance aircraft, four warships and a C130 transport plane were sent to find the marines as the weather improved.
The vessel had suffered an engine malfunction as it took on water and went down about 20 nautical miles off the Bang Saphan district. The US-made corvette had been in use since 1987 and was carrying 105 military personnel.
Most on board were rescued before the boat sank but dozens had to abandon ship in rafts and lifejackets.
Lieutenant Colonel Pichitchai Tuannadee, captain of the sunken ship, said he was in the sea for two hours before he scrambled on to a raft and was found by search teams on Monday.
“To see something as small as a life ring or a person’s head above the surface of the water, it’s very hard to see with the big waves,” he said, adding that the missing sailors were likely to be fatigued by now from having to tread water and make sure those without vests stayed afloat.
One of the marines was found late on Monday clinging to a buoy.
“He was floating in the water for 10 hours. He was still conscious, so we could take him out of the water safely,” said the commander of one of the search vessels.
Relatives of the missing gathered at rescue centres awaiting news of loved ones.
Malinee Pudphong, aunt of missing marine Saharat Esa, said she spoke to her nephew by phone before the boat went down and was shocked to hear he did not get a lifejacket.
“It’s a body of a 21-year-old,” she said. “He’s not strong enough.”
Navy chief Admiral Choengchai Chomchoengpaet said the sinking would be investigated, including reports that there were not enough lifejackets on board.
U.S. Warship Arrives in Stockholm for Military Exercises, and as a Warning
ABOARD U.S.S. KEARSARGE, in the port of Stockholm — If ever there was a potent symbol of how much Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has altered Europe, the sight of this enormous battleship, bristling with 26 warplanes and 2,400 Marines and sailors, moored among the pleasure craft and tour boats that ply this port, would certainly be it.
“No one in Stockholm can miss that there is this big American ship here in our city,” said Micael Byden, the supreme commander of the Swedish Armed Forces, standing on the amphibious assault ship’s deck in the shadow of a MV-22 Osprey under a clear sky on Saturday. “There are more capabilities on this ship,” he marveled, “than I could gather in a garrison.”
In this perennially neutral country that is suddenly not so neutral, the U.S.S. Kearsarge, which showed up just two weeks after Sweden and Finland announced their intention to seek membership in NATO, is the promise of what that membership would bring: protection if President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia turns his ire toward his Nordic neighbors.
But the ship is also a warning to Sweden and Finland of their own potential obligations should a conflict arise, as Gen. Mark Milley, America’s most senior military commander, made clear during a visit Saturday.
“The Russians have their Baltic fleet,” General Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, but NATO would have its own slew of member countries wrapped around the Baltic Sea once Sweden and Finland join. In essence, the Baltic would become a NATO lake, save for St. Petersburg and Kalingrad.
“From a Russian perspective, that would be very problematic for them, militarily speaking,” General Milley said.
Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson of Sweden, appearing in a shipboard news conference beside General Milley, sought to emphasize the defensive nature of NATO.
But military experts say that there is a clear expectation that Sweden and Finland’s accession to the alliance means that they would contribute to any maritime chokeholds that NATO might put in place in the Baltic Sea in the event of a war with Russia, a potentially tall order for the historically nonaligned countries.
Both countries want security assurances, particularly from the United States and other NATO allies, during this interim period while negotiations with Turkey are holding up their formal membership to the military alliance. Sweden’s Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist told reporters in Washington two weeks ago that the Pentagon had pledged several interim security measures: U.S. Navy warships steaming in the Baltic Sea, Air Force bombers flying over Scandinavian skies, army forces training together and American specialists helping to thwart any possible Russian cyberattacks.
But while President Biden has pledged that the United States would help defend Sweden and Finland before they join the alliance, American officials have refused to say specifically what form that help would take, beyond what General Milley characterized Saturday as a “modest increase” in joint military exercises.
The refusal of any NATO country to send actual troops into Ukraine, Nordic officials acknowledged, lays bare the difference between promises of military help for friendly countries versus that under a Senate-ratified treaty that says an attack on one is an attack on all — NATO’s famous Article 5.
Still, the Kearsarge is in the Baltic Sea to take part in exercises meant to teach NATO, Swedish and Finnish troops how to carry out amphibious assaults — storming land that has been seized by, say, Russia. It is a hugely complex kind of war operation — think the D-Day landing during World War II — that requires coordination between air, land and naval units in what military planners call a “combined arms” mission.
If the exercises go according to plan, thousands of marines, sailors, pilots and other troops from 16 different countries will be seizing a beach head in the Stockholm archipelago.
It is exactly the kind of military operation that Russia has not managed to pull off yet in Ukraine, and that inability to do so, military experts say, is a big part of why Russia has not managed to take the southern Ukrainian port city of Odesa.
Pentagon officials note that when thousands of Russian marines landed in southern Ukraine on the Sea of Azov coastline on Feb. 25 to target Mariupol, they did so some 43 miles to the east of the city, avoiding having to do an actual contested amphibious assault.
Russia-Ukraine War: Key Developments
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On the ground. As airstrikes intensified in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, the main focus of Russia’s onslaught, street fighting raged in the contested city of Sievierodonetsk. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general, warned that the conflict appeared to have become a “war of attrition” and advised allies to be prepared for “the long haul.”
Along with the rupturing of the notion that the Russian military is an efficient machine, the request by Sweden and Finland to join NATO is perhaps the biggest unintended consequence of Mr. Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. Instead, Mr. Putin is now facing the prospect of a NATO military alliance that is not just on his doorstep but wrapped around part of the house.
The 2004 accession of Latvia and Estonia to NATO stretched its Baltic border with Russia for just over 300 miles; Finland’s joining the alliance would add another 830 miles, putting St. Petersburg almost within artillery range.
Sweden, meanwhile, shares a maritime border with Russia, as does Finland. Within a day of Finland’s leaders announcing their country should apply for NATO membership, the Kearsarge, named after a Civil War Union sloop famous for sinking Confederate ships, was heading to join Finnish and Swedish navies for training.
In fact, NATO has scheduled many shows of force with Sweden and Finland. “A whole host of exercises that didn’t exist on the exercise schedule are there now,” said Charly Salonius-Pasternak, a military expert with the Finnish Institute of International Affairs in Helsinki.
The emerging partnership is a two-way street. For NATO, beyond wrapping the alliance all around Russia’s western border, the entry of Sweden and Finland allows military planners to reconceptualize all of northern European defenses. In the past, the alliance had to make compromises about where to concentrate troops, headquarters and command and control to provide to best advantage.
All of this will undoubtedly draw the ire of Mr. Putin, who has long complained about the expansion of the military alliance into what he sees as his own sphere of influence.
“There’s going to be an almost continuous presence of non-Finnish military units in Finland,” Mr. Salonius-Pasternak said. “Are they the key to Finnish defense? No. But it probably adds to the calculus of our eastern neighbor.”
The Moskva: US provided intelligence that helped Ukraine target Russian warship
Ukrainian forces, having spotted the Russian warship in the Black Sea, called their American contacts for confirmation that it was in fact the Moskva, sources familiar with the events told CNN. The US responded that it was, and provided intelligence about its location. It is not clear whether the US knew Ukraine would move to strike the ship, however, and the US was not involved in that decision, the sources said.
The episode, first reported by NBC News, reflects the Biden administration’s increasingly forward-leaning posture when it comes to sharing intelligence with Ukraine, part of a broader policy shift toward helping Ukraine defeat Russia decisively on the battlefield and significantly weaken its military.
But it also raises questions about what the red lines are for the US and Russia when it comes to US military support to Ukraine.
The US has for months provided Ukrainian forces with intelligence about Russian troop movements inside Ukraine, including intercepted communications about Russian military planning. It also provides Ukraine with maritime awareness information to allow the country to better understand the threat posed by Russian ships in the Black Sea, many of which are firing missiles onto Ukrainian territory.
There are also clear limits, however, to what the US will share, multiple sources told CNN.
For example, the US has so far declined to provide information to Ukraine about potential targets inside Russia itself. And while the intelligence the US shares about Russian troop movements inside Ukraine can include details like vehicles and types of personnel at a particular location, the US has not provided Ukraine with intelligence about specific Russian military leaders’ whereabouts, officials have said.
“We do not provide intelligence on the location of senior military leaders on the battlefield or participate in the targeting decisions of the Ukrainian military,” Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters on Thursday.
Kirby added that “Ukraine combines information that we and other partners provide with the intelligence that they themselves are gathering on the battlefield, and then they make their own decisions, and they take their own actions.”
Following a series of military and logistical setbacks, Moscow has most recently concentrated efforts on the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, which has been on the front line of the Russia-Ukraine conflict since 2014.
Heavy fighting continued on Thursday inside the Azovstal steel complex, according to Lt. Col. Denys Prokopenko, a Ukrainian commander at the plant. He claimed the Russians had broken their pledge to allow civilians to leave through evacuation corridors Thursday.
There are thought to be between 200 and 300 civilians still inside the plant, including 30 children. Since Sunday, it has been bombarded from land, sea and air.
“For two days now, the enemy has broken into the territory of the plant. There are heavy, bloody battles,” Prokopenko said.
This story has been updated with additional details.
CNN’s Paul LeBlanc contributed to this report.
Pentagon confirms Ukrainian missiles attacked Moskva warship as Russians continue Mariupol siege
Ukrainian satisfaction at Thursday’s successful sinking of the Moskva, a guided missile cruiser, was tempered by the situation in Mariupol, and a Russian warning that it would step up strikes on Ukraine’s capital. Blasts were reported outside Kyiv on Friday, with Russian forces saying in a statement that they fired missiles on a suburban factory that produces Ukrainian defense weapons, in retaliation for what it claimed were attempted Ukrainian assaults on border towns inside Russia.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky continued to press Western leaders to increase their efforts to isolate Russia. In a recent phone call with President Biden, Zelensky made a direct appeal for the United States to designate Russia a state sponsor of terrorism, one of the most powerful and far-reaching sanctions in the U.S. arsenal, The Washington Post first reported.
While Biden told his Ukrainian counterpart that he was willing to explore a range of proposals to exert greater pressure on Moscow, he did not commit to specific actions, according to people familiar with the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive dialogue between the two leaders.
Even during the Cold War, Washington refrained from designating the Soviet Union in this manner, despite Moscow’s support for groups considered terrorist actors throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Such a measure could have a range of effects, including the imposition of economic penalties on dozens of other nations that continue to do business with Russia; the freezing of Moscow’s assets in the United States, including real estate; and the prohibition of a variety of dual-use exports.
The label, which requires a finding by the secretary of state, can be applied to any country that has “repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism,” according to a State Department fact sheet. The list names four countries: North Korea, Cuba, Iran and Syria.
When Secretary of State Antony Blinken was asked directly about U.S. support for the designation at a news conference last month, he said, “We are and we will look at everything.”
“Our focus first and foremost is on doing everything we can to help bring this war to a quick end, to stop the suffering of the Ukrainian people,” Blinken told reporters at the State Department.
The destruction of the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet by homegrown Ukrainian weapons represented a deeply symbolic victory for Ukraine, and a significant blow to Russia’s naval capacity.
The sinking removed a vessel that Moscow will be unable to replace in the Ukraine theater, according to the U.S. defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the Pentagon. Russia has two other similar ships in its navy, but neither is based in the Black Sea. Turkey, which controls the entrance to the sea through the Dardanelles and Bosporus straits, has said that it will only allow ships through that already have a home port there.
Russia had previously acknowledged the sinking of the cruiser but said only that had been damaged by “heavy storms” and a fire.
Russia’s Defense Ministry, meanwhile, claimed a further advance on Mariupol on Friday morning, saying its forces were now in full control of the city’s Ilyich Iron and Steel Works factory. Separately, Ukraine’s Azov battalion was said to be maintain a tenuous hold on the Azovstal steel plant, one of the last bastions in the city outside of Russian control, where photographs from the scene Friday appeared to show smoke billowing from the heavily industrial area.
Both steel plants are owned by Metinvest, a company controlled by billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man.
“The city of Mariupol is no more,” Pavlo Kyrylenko, the governor of Ukraine’s Donetsk region told CNN. “The city of Mariupol has been wiped off the face of the earth by the Russian Federation.”
Earlier in the week, Martin Griffiths, the United Nations undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, described Mariupol as “an epicenter of horror,” and renewed calls for safe evacuations of remaining civilians from the city. Its mayor, Vadym Boychenko, said that after mass evacuations and deaths, 50,000 to 70,000 people remained in Mariupol, whose prewar population was more than 400,000.
In a Thursday night video address marking the 50th day, Zelensky said defense of the country since Feb. 24, the day the Russian invasion began, was an “achievement for millions of Ukrainians.”
“You have all become heroes. All Ukrainian men and women who withstood and do not give up,” Zelensky said.
Zelensky also used the occasion to repeat his thanks to those unnamed world leaders he said have shown “great generosity” to Ukraine, and to continue his criticism of those who were “behaving as if they had no power.”
Biden this week announced an additional $800 million in U.S. weapons shipments to Ukraine, as Russia has been amassing troops, military vehicles and equipment on both sides of its border with eastern Ukraine in preparation for an assault on the country’s eastern Donbas region.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that Russia’s Foreign Ministry had sent a diplomatic note to the State Department warning of “unpredictable consequences” if the shipments did not stop. On Friday, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova confirmed the note, and said that similar demarches on arms shipments to Ukraine were sent “to all countries,” Russia’s Interfax news agency reported.
In Kherson, a city about 400 miles south of Kyiv that was quickly seized by Russian forces during the first week after the invasion, at least 824 new graves were dug in a cemetery on the city’s outskirts between Feb. 28 and April 15, according to recent satellite imagery analyzed by London-based nonprofit Centre for Information Resilience (CIR).
CIR has been monitoring a number of gravesites and cemeteries in Russian-occupied areas or areas where Russian forces are close by, said Benjamin Strick, the director of investigations. “It’s scary to think of how [civilians] died and what else is happening in these areas,” Strick told The Post.
Similarly, the group recently spotted mass graves in a forest near Chernihiv, a regional capital. New graves continued to be dug even after the city was returned to Ukrainian control after weeks of Russian siege, according to the imagery from Planet Lab.
Other allegations of atrocities have been harder to confirm. Kyiv regional police chief Andriy Nyebytov contended on Friday that officials have found more than 900 dead civilians in the region of roughly 3 million people in the wake of Russia’s withdrawal of its ground troops in the area early this month.
Even as it has withdrawn from areas in the north, the Russian buildup continued in and around the Donbas region. Russian forces occupy territory just outside the city of Kharkiv, northwest of region, where regional governor Oleh Synegubov claimed Friday that Russians had shelled a residential area, killing at least 10 people, including a 7-month-old baby, the Kyiv Independent reported.
In the same area, Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had information the Ukrainian military plans to launch a missile strike on refugees massing at a railway station in the town of Lozova, and then blame it on the Russian Army. A week ago, Russia allegedly launched a missile attack against the train station in the Donbas city of Kramatorsk that killed dozens of civilians. Russia has denied responsibility for the attack.
The Ukrainian authorities are plotting a provocation in Lozova “similar to the one in Kramatorsk to accuse servicemen of the Russian Federation of so-called war crimes,” said Mikhail Mizintsev, head of the Russian National Defense Control Center, according to Interfax.
New video footage and images from the Luhansk region, which is part of Donbas, show burned bodies among the rubble of a nursing home destroyed last month. Regional governor Serhiy Haidai said Friday that Russian troops had shelled homes and infrastructure in the area, killing two civilians.
Meanwhile, in Moscow, the Foreign Ministry warned of “negative consequences” for European security if Sweden and Finland follow through on indications they may want to join NATO.
“Why our Finnish and Swedish neighbors in the Baltic region should turn into a new frontier of confrontation between the NATO bloc and Russia is unclear,” Zakharova, the ministry spokeswoman, said. “The negative consequences for peace and stability in northern Europe are obvious.”
Prime Minister Sanna Marin of Finland, which shares an 830-mile land border with Russia, said her country would make a decision in the coming weeks. She made the comment after a visit Wednesday to Sweden, which is considering abandoning decades of military neutrality and applying for NATO membership.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Ukraine’s professed desire to join NATO was a security threat to Russia and one of the reasons for the invasion. Ukraine has since said it would abandon its hopes of membership in the alliance, but wanted “security guarantees” from other countries against Russian aggression in the future.
Zakharova acknowledged that “the choice is up to the authorities of Sweden and Finland.”
“But they should also understand the consequences of such a step for our bilateral relations and the European security architecture as a whole, which is now in a state of crisis,” Zakharova added.
Dmitry Medvedev, an ally of Putin who serves as deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said Thursday that NATO expansion would lead Moscow to strengthen its forces, including nuclear forces, to “balance” military capability in the Baltic region.
Meanwhile, Russia’s telecom regulator Roskomnadzor blocked the Russian-language website of the Moscow Times Friday after the site published what authorities called a false report on riot police officers refusing to fight in Ukraine on April 4.
The Moscow Times said it had not been notified of the decision. Its English-language website remains online, and its Russian pages are accessible abroad and via VPN within Russia. Russia has blocked numerous foreign and domestic websites since its invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are among those that have been barred.
Adela Suliman, Joyce Lee, Jon Swaine, Amy Cheng, Atthar Mirza, Marisa Iati, David L. Stern, Timothy Bella, Meryl Kornfield, Paul Sonne and Julian Duplain contributed to this report.
Russia loses warship, says attacks on Kyiv will increase
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia’s Defense Ministry promised Friday to ramp up missile attacks on the Ukrainian capital in response to Ukraine’s alleged aggression on Russian territory, an ominous warning that followed Moscow’s stinging symbolic loss of its navy’s flagship in the Black Sea.
The threat of intensified attacks on Kyiv came after Russian authorities accused Ukraine of wounding seven people and damaging about 100 residential buildings with airstrikes on Bryansk, a region bordering Ukraine. Authorities in another border region of Russia also reported Ukrainian shelling Thursday.
“The number and the scale of missile attacks on objects in Kyiv will be ramped up in response to the Kyiv nationalist regime committing any terrorist attacks or diversions on the Russian territory,” Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said.
A renewed bombardment could return Kyiv’s residents to the steady wail of air raid sirens heard during the early days of Russia’s invasion and to fearful nights sheltering in subway stations. The capital has displayed tentative signs of pre-war life after Russian troops failed to capture the city and retreated to concentrate on eastern Ukraine, leaving behind evidence of possible war crimes.
Russia previously accused Ukraine of shelling or attacking its border regions. Ukrainian officials have not confirmed striking targets in Russia, and the reports could not be independently verified.
However, Ukrainian officials insist their forces did strike a key Russian warship with missiles. If true, the reported Wednesday attack on the guided-missile cruiser Moskva, named for the Russian capital, would represent an important victory for Ukraine and a symbolic defeat for Russia.
The flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet sank while being towed to port Thursday after suffering heavy damage under circumstances that remained in dispute. Moscow acknowledged a fire on board but not any attack. U.S. and other Western officials could not confirm what caused the blaze.
The Moskva had the capacity to carry 16 long-range cruise missiles. If Ukrainian forces took out the vessel, it was likely the largest warship to be sunk in combat since the Falklands War. A British submarine torpedoed an Argentine navy cruiser called the ARA General Belgrano during the 1982 conflict, killing over 300 sailors.
The sinking of the Russian warship reduces Russia’s firepower in the Black Sea, although military analysts disagreed on the event’s significance to the course of the war. Either way, the loss was viewed as emblematic of Moscow’s fortunes in a seven-week invasion widely seen as a historic blunder following the retreat from the Kyiv region and much of northern Ukraine.
“A ‘flagship’ russian warship is a worthy diving site. We have one more diving spot in the Black Sea now. Will definitely visit the wreck after our victory in the war,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov tweeted Friday in a likely apocryphal boast.
In his nightly address Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Ukrainians they should be proud of having survived 50 days under Russian attack when the invaders “gave us a maximum of five.”
Russia’s warning of renewed airstrikes did not stop Kyiv residents from taking advantage of a sunny and slightly warmer spring day as the weekend approached. More people than usual were out on the streets Friday, walking their dogs, riding electric scooters and strolling hand in hand.
In one central park, a small group of young people, one draped in a Ukrainian flag, danced to the music of a portable speaker.
News about the Moskva overshadowed Russian claims of advances in the southern port city of Mariupol, which Moscow’s forces have blockaded since the early days of the invasion. Dwindling numbers of Ukrainian defenders have held out against a siege that has come at a horrific cost to trapped and starving civilians.
Mariupol’s mayor said this week that more than 10,000 civilians had died and the death toll could surpass 20,000. Other Ukrainian officials have said they expect to find evidence of atrocities against civilians like the ones discovered in Bucha and other towns outside Kyiv.
The Mariupol City Council said Friday that locals reported seeing Russian troops digging up bodies that were buried in residential courtyards and not allowing new burials “of people killed by them.”
“Why the exhumation is being carried out and where the bodies will be taken is unknown,” the council said on the Telegram messaging app.
Mariupol’s capture would allow Russian forces in the south, which came up through the annexed Crimean Peninsula, to fully link up with troops in the Donbas region, Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland and the target of the looming offensive.
Moscow-backed separatists have fought Ukrainian forces in the Donbas since 2014, the same year Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine. Russia has recognized the independence of two rebel-held areas of the region.
Although it’s not certain when Russia will launch the full-scale campaign, a regional Ukrainian official said Friday that seven people died and 27 were injured after Russian forces opened fire on buses carrying civilians in the village of Borovaya, near the northeastern city of Kharkiv. The claim could not be independently verified.
Dmytro Chubenko, a spokesman for the regional prosecutor’s office, told Ukraine’s Suspilne news website, that Ukrainian authorities had opened criminal proceedings in connection with a suspected “violation of the laws and customs of war, combined with premeditated murder.”
A large explosion also struck the eastern city of Kramatorsk, where a missile strike on a train station a week earlier killed more than 50 people as thousands heeding warnings to evacuate the Donbas area waited to leave.
Associated Press journalists in Kramatorsk heard the sound of a rocket or missile and then the blast, followed by sirens wailing Friday. It was not immediately clear what was hit or whether there were casualties.
The Russian Defense Ministry said Friday that Russian strikes in the Kharkiv region “liquidated a squad of mercenaries from a Polish private military company” of up to 30 people and “liberated” an iron and steel factor in Mariupol. The claims could not be independently verified.
On Thursday, the Defense Ministry explained the damage to Russia’s Black Sea flagship by a fire had caused ammunition on board to detonate. Apart from the cruise missiles, the Moskva also carried air-defense missiles and other guns.
The ministry did not say what might have caused the blaze but reported the that the crew, which usually numbers about 500, abandoned the vessel. It wasn’t clear if there were any casualties.
Maksym Marchenko, governor of Ukraine’s Black Sea region of Odesa, said Ukrainian forces struck the Moskva with two Neptune missiles and caused “serious damage.” The Neptune is an anti-ship missile recently developed by Ukraine based on an earlier Soviet design.
According to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, the missile system can hit targets up to 280 kilometers (175 miles) away. That would have put the Moskva within range, based on where the ship was when the fire began.
Other Russian ships in the northern Black Sea moved farther south after the Moskva incident, a senior U.S. defense official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal military assessments.
Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24 and has suffered thousands of military casualties. The conflict has killed untold numbers of Ukrainian civilians and forced millions more to flee.
It has also further inflated prices at grocery stores and gasoline pumps, while dragging on the global economy. The head of the International Monetary Fund said Thursday that the war helped push the organization to downgrade economic forecasts for 143 countries.
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Associated Press journalists around the world contributed to this report.
Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
Russian warship sinks days after Ukrainian commemorative stamp is issued
The sinking of Russian guided-missile cruiser Moskva in the Black Sea comes days after Ukraine issued a stamp immortalizing the famous exchange on Snake Island between Russian and Ukrainian forces.
A Ukrainian presidential adviser confirmed on Thursday the Moskva was one of the vessels involved in the exchange in February.
The island was hit by Russian missile strikes after Ukrainian defenders responded to the threat of Russian invasion with the words: “Russian warship, go f*** yourself.”
The stamp: Ukrposhta, Ukraine’s postal service, announced on Tuesday it had issued a postage stamp with the slogan. It shows a Ukrainian solider standing defiant, facing down a Russian warship in open water.
Roman Hrybov — the Ukrainian soldier who uttered the phrase — was invited to the ceremony unveiling the stamp, the service said in a statement.
Some context: It was initially believed the Ukrainian soldiers were killed in a subsequent attack, but were instead forced to surrender “due to the lack of ammunition,” according to the Ukrainian navy. Hrybov was later released as part of a prisoner exchange.
The phrase has become a popular Ukrainian slogan during the invasion and used as a symbol of defiance.
“There would be neither postage stamp nor such strong resistance as exemplified by soldiers from Zmiinyi Island (Snake Island) without him,” the statement read.
The warship: Conflicting accounts have emerged over the sinking of the warship, which was reported Thursday by Russian state news agency TASS.
Ukraine’s Operational Command South claimed Thursday that the Moskva had begun to sink after it was hit by Neptune anti-ship missiles.
Russia claimed a fire broke out, causing munitions aboard to explode, inflicting serious damage to the vessel and forcing its crew to be evacuated.
CNN has not been able to independently verify what caused the damage to the ship.
Read more about the sinking:
Russian warship sinks in the Black Sea after Ukraine claims it was hit by a missile
Russian state news agency TASS reported Thursday evening that the guided-missile cruiser Moskva had sunk, citing a statement from the Russian Ministry of Defense.
“During the towing of the cruiser Moskva to the port of destination, the ship lost its stability due to hull damage received during a fire from the detonation of ammunition. In the conditions of stormy seas, the ship sank,” the statement said, according to TASS.
Conflicting accounts have emerged about the incident.
Ukraine’s Operational Command South claimed earlier on Thursday that the Moskva had begun to sink after it was hit Ukrainian Neptune anti-ship missiles.
“In the Black Sea operational zone, Neptune anti-ship cruise missiles hit the cruiser Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet — it received significant damage,” the statement said. “A fire broke out. Other units of the ship’s group tried to help, but a storm and a powerful explosion of ammunition overturned the cruiser and it began to sink.”
Russia said a fire broke out on the guided-missile cruiser, causing munitions aboard to explode, inflicting serious damage to the vessel, and forcing the crew of the warship to be evacuated.
CNN has not been able to independently verify what caused the damage to the ship.
Earlier in the day Russia’s defense ministry had said that the Moskva “remains afloat” and that measures were being taken to tow it to port. The ministry said the crew had been evacuated to other Black Sea Fleet ships in the area.
Two sources familiar with US and Western intelligence told CNN on Thursday that Ukraine’s claim is believed to be credible, although US officials do not yet have definitive proof.
One source familiar with the latest intelligence said that the US believes with “medium confidence” that Ukraine’s version of events is accurate.
Both sources cautioned that the US has not yet made an independent attribution.
“We’re not in a position to officially confirm independently what exactly led to the ship’s now sinking,” Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Thursday. “But we’re also not in any position to refute the Ukrainian side of this. It’s certainly plausible and possible that they did in fact hit this with a Neptune missile or maybe more.”
Whatever happened to the Moskva, analysts say its loss would strike hard at the heart of the Russian navy as well as national pride, comparable to the US Navy losing a battleship during World War II or an aircraft carrier today.
“Only the loss of a ballistic missile submarine or the Kutznetsov (Russia’s lone aircraft carrier) would inflict a more serious blow to Russian morale and the navy’s reputation with the Russian public,” said Carl Schuster, a retired US Navy captain and former director of operations at the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center.
Alessio Patalano, professor of war and strategy at King’s College in London, said losing the warship would be a “massive blow” for Russia.
“Ships operate away from public attention and their activities are rarely the subject of news. But they are large floating pieces of national territory, and when you lose one, a flagship no less, the political and symbolic message — in addition to the military loss — stands out precisely because of it,” he said.
The 611-foot-long (186 meters) Moskva, with a crew of almost 500, is the pride of the Russian naval fleet in the Black Sea. Originally commissioned into the Soviet navy as the Slava in the 1980s, it was renamed Moskva in 1995 and after a refit reentered service in 1998, according to military site Naval-Technology.com.
The Moskva is armed with a range of anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles as well as torpedoes and naval guns and close-in missile defense systems.
All those represent massive amounts of explosive ordnance in its ammunition magazines. Any fire nearing them would have given the crew limited options to deal with the threat, Schuster said.
“When a fire reaches your ammunition magazine(s), you have two choices; 1) flood them or 2) abandon ship,” Schuster said. “Otherwise your crew is onboard to be wiped out by the catastrophic explosion that follows a fire reaching several hundred tons of ordnance.”
Odesa state regional administrator Maxim Marchenko claimed in a post on Telegram that Ukrainian forces had used Neptune cruises missiles to attack the Moskva. If that’s true, the Moskva would potentially be the largest warship ever taken out of action by a missile, Schuster said.
Such an achievement would represent a big advance for Kyiv’s forces.
The Neptune is a Ukrainian weapon, developed domestically based on the Soviet KH-35 cruise missile. It became operational in the Ukrainian forces just last year, according to Ukrainian media reports.
If it was used to attack the Moskva, it would be the first known use of the Neptune during the war, according to a post on the website of the Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC) from Lt. Cmdr. Jason Lancaster, a US Navy surface warfare officer.
His post for the CIMSEC on Tuesday said the threat posed by mobile shore-based cruise missiles like the Neptune “changes operational behavior” of an enemy.
Russian “ships will operate in ways to minimize the risk of detection and maximize their chances to defend themselves,” Lancaster wrote. “These behavioral changes limit Russia’s ability to utilize their fleet to their advantage. The added stress of sudden combat increases fatigue and can lead to mistakes.”
According to Patalano, the war professor: “It would appear the Russians have learned that the hard way today.”
In the CIMSEC post, Lancaster notes the British Royal Navy lost several ships to missiles fired by Argentina during the 1982 Falklands War.
During that war, a British submarine sank the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano, a former World War II US Navy ship similar in size to the Moskva.
The Moskva also poses symbolic significance to Ukraine as it was one of the ships involved in the famous exchange at Snake Island in February, according to Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
According to a purported audio exchange in late February, as the Russians approached the Ukrainian garrison on Snake Island, also known as Zmiinyi Island, in the Black Sea, a Russian officer said: “This is a military warship. This is a Russian military warship. I suggest you lay down your weapons and surrender to avoid bloodshed and needless casualties. Otherwise, you will be bombed.”
A Ukrainian soldier responded: “Russian warship, go f*** yourself.”
On Thursday, Ukrainian National Security Advisor Oleksiy Danilov told CNN that the strike on the Moskva was a very important mission for his country’s military and vowed there would be more such dramatic actions.
“It is a very important mission for us. The Moskva was there near the Snake Island and was hit yesterday by two powerful Ukrainian-made missiles,” Danilov said. “(Putin) came to kill our children, our women, our civilians. That is our gift to him. And this is just the beginning. There will be more than one Moskva.”
This is the second large-sized Russian naval vessel to suffer that fate during Moscow’s war with Ukraine.
In late March, Ukraine said a missile strike had destroyed a Russian landing ship at the port of Berdiansk.
Nathan Hodge and Olga Voitovych contributed to this report from Lviv, Ukraine. Vasco Cotovio contributed from Kyiv, Ukraine. Natasha Bertrand, Anna Chernova, Radina Gigova and Jorge Engels also contributed to this report.
Russia-Ukraine War: Latest News and Live Updates on Moskva Warship
In the days after the Russian withdrawal from the outskirts of Kyiv, a driver named Oleg Naumenko opened the trunk of an abandoned car and it exploded, killing him instantly.
The car had been booby-trapped, and his family and local authorities blamed Russian soldiers. “I died with him in that moment,” Mr. Naumenko’s wife, Valeria, said between sobs.
As ordinary Ukrainians emerge from basements and bunkers into the ruins of their hometowns, many are being confronted with a new horror: thousands of mines and unexploded bombs left behind by retreating Russian troops.
Residents and authorities say that departing Russian soldiers have laced large swaths of the country with buried land mines and jury-rigged bombs — some hidden as booby traps inside homes. The explosives now must be found and neutralized before residents can resume a semblance of normal life.
Some of the explosives have been attached to washing machines, doorways, car windows, and other places where they can kill or injure civilians returning to their homes, according to residents and Ukrainian officials. Some were even hidden under hospital stretchers and corpses.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine this week called his country “one of the most contaminated by mines in the world,” and said that authorities were working to clear thousands in the areas from which Russian armies had retreated in recent weeks. He accused Russian soldiers of leaving the explosives in their wake “to kill or maim as many of our people as possible.”
He said that the tactic was a war crime and that Russian soldiers must have been acting on instructions from top officials, adding: “Without the appropriate orders, they would not have done it.”
Human Rights Watch and The New York Times have reported that Russian forces in Ukraine appear to be using advanced land mines in the eastern city of Kharkiv. Several local officials have also said that bomb squads in their districts have found explosive devices left behind in homes.
Anti-personnel mines, which are designed to kill people, are banned by an international treaty signed by nearly every country in the world, including Ukraine; Russia and the United States have declined to join.
Ukraine’s emergency services agency has deployed a small army of about 550 mine specialists to clear the areas recently occupied by Russian forces. The teams have been working to remove about 6,000 explosives per day, and since the start of Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24, they have found more than 54,000 explosive devices, the agency reported on Tuesday.
“Wherever the occupiers stayed overnight, they would set up tripwires,” Ukraine’s interior minister, Denys Monastyrsky, said during a televised interview on Sunday. “Explosives have been found under helmets, attached to doors, in the washing machine, and in cars.”
The placement of explosives in Ukrainian homes could not be independently verified.
Mr. Naumenko, who was killed on April 4, worked as a driver in the village of Hoholiv, about 40 miles outside of Kyiv. But his talent lay in repairing cars. After Russian forces retreated from a nearby village, neighbors found an abandoned vehicle and turned it over to him.
His wife learned of his death the next day in Poland, where she had fled with their 7-year-old son and her mother at the start of the war. She returned to their village as soon as she got the news. “What was left was the car, with the door still open and a pool of blood,” Ms. Naumenko, 28, said, “and a big emptiness.”
Her account was confirmed through photos and by the Kyiv regional police, who posted a report about the incident on their Facebook page, cautioning returning residents to “not touch objects and things that are not previously tested by experts.”
Other local officials are urging residents to call emergency services before entering their homes.
Retreating armies often bury land mines in order to slow the advance of enemy armies. But experts say Russian forces have a well-earned reputation for booby-trapping areas they have vacated in order to kill and maim returning civilians.
Human Rights Watch has documented Russia’s use of antipersonnel mines in more than 30 countries where Moscow’s forces were involved, including conflicts in Syria and Libya. In Palmyra, during the Syrian war, booby traps surfaced after the Russians vacated the town.
“Leaving behind little presents for the civilians when they return — like hand grenades, trip wires, unexploded shells, pressure plates — it’s in the Russian military tradition to do that,” said Mark Hiznay, the senior arms researcher at Human Rights Watch.
“We’ve seen it before and we’ll see it again,” he said.
Mr. Hiznay said “putting a land mine in someone’s freezer” was a tactic that has no utility other than to terrorize civilians. Ukraine will be dealing with the consequences of land mines “one civilian leg at a time,” he added, explaining that it can often take years, and possibly decades, to clear all the ordnance.
“The presence of these devices denies civilians their terrain and forces them to make hard choices: take the sheep out to graze or risk stepping on a mine in the pasture,” he said.