SIDtoday also stated that the NIS report was issued on “Saturday 12 August,” the same day as the Kursk explosions. These delays do not appear to have been reported previously. Another 1 ½ hour passed before the sub call dissemination activity started.” Experts believe this dissemination activity was the fleet’s first attempts to communicate with the Kursk. “Thus, 3 ½ hours passed before any suspicion of problems on board OSCAR II 850 arose. “It seems as if the Northern Fleet was not aware that the explosions had occurred on one of their vessels,” an NIS report quoted in the SIDtoday article stated. As SIDtoday recounted, the Kursk’s sinking “occurred without any distress calls or communications of its problems.” By the time the Kursk landed on the seafloor, it was unable to contact the Northern Fleet command, and the aftermath of the explosion demonstrated a communication failure in which the Russian navy effectively lost track of its submarine. Their resilience made it all the more lamentable that it took the Russian navy more than 15 hours to launch a rescue, which ultimately failed. Russian authorities also initially said that all aboard perished almost immediately in fact, 23 sailors survived the blasts and sinking, likely for at least several hours, if not days, according to evidence later found by divers. In fact, a leaking torpedo blew up during a training exercise, Russia’s official investigation later concluded. Initially, Moscow claimed that the Kursk collided with another vessel in the Barents, causing it to sink. Much remains unknown about the Russian navy’s handling of the disaster, and the official Russian narrative was not without its switchbacks. There, over decades of Cold War tensions, Western powers stood at their Soviet adversary’s doorstep, before geography and geopolitics merged to seal the fate of the 118 sailors who died aboard the Kursk. The Barents is a contentious place, not only for its Arctic climate, but because it hugs the Russian and Norwegian coastlines. “Three and a half hours passed before any suspicion of problems on board OSCAR II 850 arose.”įor Putin, that mismanagement stood among the most prominent examples of how Russia’s military and diplomatic capabilities broke down after the fall of the Soviet Union, staining the early years of his presidency and ultimately spurring him to tighten his political grip. The account, provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden and published with this article, indicates that Norwegian intelligence was aware the catastrophe had occurred two days earlier than it has said was the case, and provides new details on the timeline of the Russian naval response to the explosions, underscoring the extent to which the crisis was mismanaged. The officer later described responses to the disaster from the NSA and its counterpart the Norwegian Intelligence Service in an account he wrote for an NSA internal news site, SIDtoday. The blast was followed by a second, larger explosion that drove the vessel to the bottom of the Barents, inciting a crisis during what was to have been a milestone show of force by the Russian Northern Fleet.Ī National Security Agency staffer monitored the dismal events from Oslo, Norway, where he had arrived as a signals liaison officer barely one month prior. On August 12, 2000, a year after Putin took the helm as President Boris Yeltsin’s premier and less than six months into his own presidency, an explosion rocked the forward torpedo room of the Oscar II class Russian submarine Kursk. elections, it was in those frigid waters off the navy base at Vidyayevo, in the northwestern corner of his country, that the Russian leader’s career took an indelible turn. And yet, long before his incursions in Syria, Ukraine, and the U.S. If one were to draw a map of the locales most pivotal to Vladimir Putin’s political trajectory, the bottom of the Barents Sea might not immediately come to mind.
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