At the bottom of the Black Sea, much of Russia's military pride and Putin's victorious account remained

“Putin says that the missile cruiser Moskva was not sunk by Ukrainians. It was they who turned it into a submarine.” The joke, also voiced in memes with the Russian leader playing naval battle, circulates on social networks in several languages. Popular ingenuity immediately caught the significance of the fact: Russia lost a fundamental piece of its war machine, and the invasion of Ukraine is becoming increasingly complicated. Naked, like every display of political humor, the weakness and loneliness of Vladimir Putin. His military adventure makes water. It doesn't even matter if it was actually hit by a Neptune missile launched by the Ukrainian marines or if it sank in a storm when it was brought to port as a result of a fire on board, as Moscow's unbelievable version says. It clearly shows the fragility of what until before this war was considered the second military power on the planet. It exposes the triumph of the weakest, of little Ukrainian David against the giant Russian Goliath.

What happened has roots as deep as its waters. The Black Sea fleet was always part of Russian pride. It was created by Empress Catherine the Great 230 years ago. He did this next to the construction of the city of Sevastopol, on the Crimean peninsula. There was also the uprising of the battleship Potemkin on June 27, 1905, which Lenin later claimed as the most important precedent of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, and turned it into a success of Soviet propaganda. He was the one who ordered the great filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein to tell the epic, which he filmed in 1925 and turned into what is considered “the best film” of his time and silent film, often honored for his scene on the steps of Odessa as in Coppola's The Godfather or Brian de Palma's Eliot Ness.

The bulk of the Russian fleet had been devastated in the war with Japan. The situation of seafarers who remained in the Black Sea was one of absolute oppression. In St. Petersburg, the fuse of the Bolshevik revolution of 1905 had been lit. Some 200,000 unarmed workers had come to the Winter Palace of Tsar Nicholas II to ask him for better wages and working conditions. The answer was brutal repression. Two hundred dead and 800 injured. Finally, the Tsar granted the grace to create the Duma, a parliament, which allowed him to remain in power for another 12 years. But the luck was already cast. It was the prelude to the ten days of November 1917 that shook the world and founded the communism that ruled for 70 years.

Taking advantage of the situation, a clandestine revolutionary group led by Grigory Vakulinchuck and Afanasi Matiushenko, organized a riot. They showed their colleagues in the Potemkin the conditions in which the meat of the ranch, infested with worms, was found. The captain of the ship and seven other officers were killed in the confrontation. Matiushenko took command and went to the port of Odessa. There they were intercepted by tsarist forces and had to flee. They found refuge in the Romanian port of Constance.

The Russian Navy recovered the Potemkin and renamed it Panteleimon. In 1909 the battleship accidentally sunk a Russian submarine, and in 1911 it ran aground and was badly damaged. After the First World War, at the end of 1914 the Panteleimon participated in the battle of Cape Sarych against warships of the Ottoman Empire. In early 1915 it bombed fortifications on the Bosphorus several times, and on one of them it was attacked by the Turkish battle cruiser Yavuz Sultan Selim, although the Panteleimon and other Russian battleships accompanying it managed to put it on the run before it caused damage. The old Potemkin became obsolete after the entry into service of new dreadnought battleships in late 1915 and in 1918 it was placed in the reserve and stationed in Sevastopol.

The Panteleimon was captured when the Germans seized Sevastopol in May 1918 and handed over to the Allies after the armistice in November of that same year. Their machines were destroyed in 1919 by the British when they were withdrawing from Sevastopol, so they wanted to prevent the Bolsheviks from using the battleship in their war against the white Russians. The ship was abandoned when the latter evacuated Crimea in 1920, and was finally scrapped by the Soviets in 1923.

With the Potemkin it was an emblem of the Russian navy, as was now the cruiser Movska. The Black Sea Fleet has always been at the center of conflicts in the region. The seizure of the strategic Sevastopol naval base in 1942, during World War II, cost the German army 170,000 casualties and a siege of 10 months. Liberated by the Soviet army in 1944, Stalin carried out an ethnic cleansing, deporting its primitive Tatar inhabitants to Central Asia, along with Armenians, Bulgarians and Greeks living in Crimea, and demoted it. It went from the Soviet Socialist Republic to the Russian oblast (province). His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, originally from Kalinovka, a village on the Russian-Ukrainian border, who had been governor of Ukraine, was the one who ceded Crimea (from Tatar Qirim) to that republic in 1954.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the Black Sea Fleet cantoned at the Sevastopol naval base was divided by an agreement signed by Presidents Boris Yeltsin of Russia and Leonidas Kravchuk of Ukraine. In May 1997, in exchange for recognizing the new borders, Moscow kept 80% of the fleet and an agreement to preserve the Sevastopol naval base for 20 years. With Putin's coming to power, the Kremlin pressured the Kyiv government in 2010 to sign a new pact whereby the Sevastopol base would remain in Russian hands for another 25 years, until 2042, in exchange Ukraine would receive the equivalent of $40 billion for a substantial reduction, by 30%, in the price of Russian gas for 10 years.

By then, the fleet was back on its feet after it had been practically dismantled and reduced to half a dozen surface ships of little military value and a single operational submarine. The Russian economic recovery, thanks to the prices of energy resources and their export to Western Europe, allowed it to invest heavily in the defence industry. He built six third-generation submarines (Varshavyanka class or Kilo III, in the NATO denomination). All equipped with Kalibr cruise missiles, with a range of 1,200 to 1,500 km, equivalent to the American Tomahawk missile.

Another 43 warships were also modernized and built, ranging from frigates to corvettes with missile capacity, deminers and Moskva as the flagship. A monster 12,500 tons and 180 meters long. Its name was “Gloria” when it was first put into service for the Soviet Navy in the early 1980s. In 1996 it was renamed the Russian capital after a transformation at a cost of $750 million, according to the calculation of Forbes magazine.

Moskva was deployed to support Russian aircraft and troops in Syria in 2015, and in 2008 patrolled the Georgian coast during the Russian-Georgian war. It operated in the Mediterranean from Tartus, where the Russian base operates on Syrian territory. With the preparations for the invasion of Ukraine, the cruise ship was deployed in the waters around Crimea. It was armed with 16 Vulkan missile launchers that have an attack range of more than 600 kilometers. The ship had the ability to cause “significant damage” in the Black Sea and was “the jewel in the crown with which Putin drew his chest to admirals,” Gary Roughead, a retired admiral and former US chief of naval operations, told the New York Times. He also explained that with the disappearance of Moskva, Russia lost its main platform for communications and control of the entire amphibious operation in the Black Sea.

It was sunk by a subsonic Neptune missile, which is a version of the old Soviet anti-ship missile Kh-35 with improved software and electronics, and has a range of 300 kilometers. The complete system, which entered service in Ukraine last year, consists of a mobile launcher based on a truck, four missiles, a reloading vehicle and a command and control vehicle. It is designed to fly close to the surface of the sea to avoid detection.

Not much is known about the crew of 510 sailors. Fourteen managed to reach Sevastopol with a lifeboat, another 54 were rescued by a Turkish ship. Former US Navy Chief Malcolm Nance said in a tweet that at least half of the remaining 442 would have died. The Neptune missile (s) that hit the keel of the Moskva caused the explosion of the ammunition loads incorporated into the ship. It caused him irreparable harm. It sank in that very place. And with it, lies at the bottom of the sea the historical military pride that Putin climbed to order the invasion of Ukraine.

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