After more than a week of silence over the fate of its sailors aboard the Moskva cruise ship, Russia confirmed one dead and 27 missing.
The Kremlin had refused to comment on testimonies about sailors missing in the shipwreck of the Moskva, the Russian Black Sea flagship that Ukraine claims to have sunk in an attack last week.
“All information is provided by the Ministry of Defense. We do not have the prerogative to communicate,” the spokesman for the presidency, Dmitri Peskov, had said on Tuesday.
Neither the navy nor the ministry had provided a balance sheet of the Moskva shipwreck, in which hundreds of people traveled.
These days, several testimonies published by Russian-language media and on social networks spoke of missing sailors.
A man living in Crimea, named Dmitri Shkrebrets, introduced himself as the father of a missing person and posted a message on Sunday on the social network VKontakte asking why his son, a simple recruit, was in a combat zone.
A woman, named Yulia Tsyvova, also claimed that her son had disappeared.
Officially, the ship's crew had been evacuated and official sources said time and again that there were no deaths, injuries or missing persons.
The Russian authorities have stressed that the ship, with a key role in coordinating Russian Black Sea ships, sank after a fire caused by the explosion of ammunition.
Ukraine claims that its forces sunk it in a missile attack.
On Saturday, the Russian Ministry of Defense released a video that presented as the meeting between a navy official and dozens of rescued from the ship, in which there could be up to 680 crew members.
The Moskva shipwreck is a humiliation for Russian forces and even analysts close to the Kremlin have asked the authorities for explanations in vain.
On March 25, Russia acknowledged 1,351 casualties in its ranks during the operation in Ukraine, a balance that was impossible to verify with independent sources and which has not been updated since then.
(With information from AFP)
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