After years of Russian denials, court accidentally admits Black Sea battleship was sunk by Ukraine

By Ivana Kottasová, Anna Chernova, CNN

(CNN) — Russia has admitted for the first time that a Ukrainian missile sank its prized Black Sea flagship, later deleting the statement and returning to the official narrative that the guided-missile cruiser Moskva went down because of a freak accident.

The Moskva was one of Russia’s most important warships when it sunk in April 2022, just seven weeks after Moscow launched its unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Kyiv was quick to claim it had hit the vessel with its Neptune anti-ship cruise missile, but Russia pushed a different narrative of the incident.

The Russian Ministry of Defense always insisted the Moskva sank after a fire broke out and caused munitions aboard to explode. The Russian military said at the time that the crew of the warship was evacuated, although it later admitted some were missing.

According to an independent Russian news outlet Mediazona, a military court in Moscow last week inadvertently corrected the Kremlin’s official narrative. The court, Mediazona said, issued a statement about the sentencing of a Ukrainian navy commander who ordered strikes against the Moskva and another ship, the Admiral Essen frigate. According to the court, he was sentenced to life in prison in absentia.

The statement was quickly wiped off the court’s website, but not before Mediazona managed to download it.

The loss of the Moskva was extremely embarrassing for Russia, marking one of Ukraine’s most significant wins of the war so far.

CNN asked Russian authorities about the apparent backtracking. Irina Zhirnova, the spokesperson for the 2nd Western District Military Court, which would have issued the now-deleted statement, said there would be no comment. The Russian military did not respond to CNN’s request.

Mediazona has reported on the circumstances of the Moskva sinking extensively in the past, publishing testimonies from the families of sailors who were killed – and whose deaths were never officially acknowledged by the Russian military.

“On April 13, 2022, a missile strike with two missiles hit the Guards missile cruiser Moskva, causing a fire and smoke filling the ship’s interior,” the court said in the statement, according to Mediazona.

“The explosion, fire, and smoke killed 20 of the cruiser’s crew, 24 suffered injuries of varying severity, and eight were missing, including during the over six-hour battle for the ship’s survival,” the statement said, according to Mediazona, adding that the ship was “not involved” in Russia’s operation in Ukraine.

Asked by CNN for a comment, Dmytro Pletenchuk, the spokesperson for Ukraine’s Naval Forces, said it was difficult for Russia to deny the facts of the sinking, especially since the families of the Moskva’s crew have been speaking out.

Tightly controlled narrative

The backtracking on the statement by the court is just the latest propaganda fail by Russian authorities.

In the early days of the invasion, the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti published, and then quickly removed, an editorial prematurely celebrating Russia’s victory in the war. Nearly four years later, Russian forces continue to grind along the front lines achieving incremental territorial gains at an extremely high cost, while Ukraine has managed to retake vast areas that Moscow initially invaded.

The Russian military and the Kremlin have exercised an extremely tight control over the narrative around Russia’s war on Ukraine – even refusing to call the conflict a “war” and referring to it instead as Russia’s “special military operation.”

Numerous journalists who have reported on the facts of the ground, including documenting massacres committed by Russian soldiers in Bucha and elsewhere, have been jailed for spreading “false information” about the Russian army.

The Committee to Protect Journalists said in December that at least 27 journalist had been imprisoned on criminal charges related to their reporting since Russia launched the full-scale invasion. The committee said that four have been released, two exiled and one killed. The rest are still in prison.

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