Is this really the Moskva? It looks like a freighter to me. If so, it was seriously shot up.
It’s her. Hanger deck plainly visible aft.
That picture is taken from the stern and the smoke is obscuring the bridge and the missile tubes. Also worth noting that it’s a ship from the 70s and didn’t exactly look menacing to begin with.
It was the lack of missile tubes that I wondered about.
Thanks.
Is it just me, or is the idea that people are demanding answers about “missing crew” from a ship that was hit by missiles and then subsequently sunk, just sort of ludicrous?
I mean, I know their families are hurting and pissed that their sons were in harm’s way in this “special operation”, but on a ship in the ocean, there are really two places you can be when missiles hit and sink it- rescued or dead. There’s not really any question of where those missing guys are, unlike say… shot down aircrew.
You can see the missile tubes in that photo. They’re partially obscured by the smoke, but at the left of the image near the bow there are diagonal lines that are clearly the anti-ship missile tubes that are prominent in peacetime photos of the ship.
(never mind)
The demand for answers about “missing crew” isn’t coming from reports that sailors are missing, I suspect, but rather from assurances that sailors are “totally not missing, totally not dead, and completely alive,” but then the conversation goes something like:
Family: “Oh, that’s so great to hear! Can I talk to him?”
Spokesperson: “Sure. In due time. But of course you know he is one of a very select group of four hundred crewmen who are being kept under a very strict communications blackout.”
Family: “Why?”
Spokesperson: “Reasons satisfactory to the state.”
Family: “But my friend, Tatyana, just heard from her husband and he said–”
Spokesperson: “Any further inquiries or disturbances on your part may result in imprisonment for up to fifteen years. Good day.”
Or whatever the party line is. That’s the sort of response (less my entirely imagined, though perhaps ultimately accurate, threat of a prison sentence) that actually could be plausible for some period of time under certain conditions, but at some point, like when it seems like the story is out and the time for secrecy is well past, the premise begins to wear thin, leading to people “demanding answers about ‘missing crew’ from a ship that was hit by missiles and then subsequently sunk,” but which for days the government was claiming was totally not hit by missiles and totally under tow to a safe port and if it did sink was totally due to an ammo explosion and a storm, but rest assured everyone is safe…
The crew are either rescued or dead, but it might be an issue whether the Russian Navy knows what happened to everybody, yet. Maybe some survived in lifeboats, others got picked up by boats or helicopters, some got taken to hospitals, some reported back to the Navy, etc. Even with the best intentions, in a chaotic situation like that it would take a while to find out what happened to everyone, and to get all that information into one place.
Of course, I don’t assume the Russian Navy has the best intentions. They’ve shown that they’ll lie and be secretive, but they might not know the truth, either.
I wonder how much is pure cussedness on the part of the Russian navy, and how much is a military secret. The Allies didn’t release information about ship losses in WWII, as I recall.
Not strictly relevant to the current events, but some people have found the Moskva on Google Maps:
That’s some remarkably detailed imagery. The image copyright says 2022, though I don’t know if it’s actually from this year. It’s docked in Sevastopol.
I think I see their problem. The ship has a big red target on it for where to hit it with a missile! Bad planning.
After all, they are Godless communists.
Capitalist spies, comrade!
I have two links for you. The first one states that Google Maps has un-blurred Russian military bases:
The second one quotes Google claiming that they never have blurred those images:
They do blurr US military installations, of course. But feel free to explore the rest of the world, there are some interesting pics there for sure.
It was actually the comment section at the second link where I found that 
. I considered posting the background info, but given that Google denies any change, I figured it wasn’t really worth mentioning. Still, now that it’s widely known that Russian military installations aren’t actually censored, more people may explore around and find interesting things.
If Google’s denials are true, I wonder where the idea that the sites used to be censored came from. Malware and/or Russian hackers doing a subtle man-in-the-middle attack to blur out the pics as seen on the viewer’s end?
Surely Google would have spotted that.
Perhaps Google is lying to confuse the Russians and/or escape reprisals.
“Bummer of a birthmark, Hal.”
Ah, Far Side, how I miss you.