Russian transparency remains submerged

FT.com / World / Europe - Neil Buckley : "When baby-faced captain Vyacheslav Milashevsky saluted and blinked in the daylight last Sunday after being rescued from his mini-submarine trapped on the ocean floor, Russia appeared to have learned from the Kursk submarine disaster in 2000. A few days later, however, those conclusions are starting to look premature.


The Kursk's sinking, five years ago tomorrow, led to the death of all 118 men on board, despite some having survived the initial explosion in one of the nuclear submarine's torpedo tubes.

The Russian navy turned down international help until it was too late to save the survivors, paranoid that international rescuers would use the opportunity to spy on the pride of Russia's Northern Fleet. Long after the theory had been discredited, the navy continued to suggest the Kursk had collided with a foreign submarine. President Vladimir Putin waited a week to break off his August holiday; Russian television channels, then controlled by wealthy oligarchs rather than the state, showed him jet-skiing on the Black Sea.

This time, the navy went public on the incident and its apparent cause, quickly sought international aid and, crucially, allowed British, American and Japanese rescuers to rapidly reach the site off Kamchatka. Captain Milashevsky and his six crew members aboard the AS-28 mini-submarine that had got tangled in a fishing net were saved.

In a front-page headline echoed in many Russian newspapers, Novaya Gazeta commented: "One lesson of the Kursk has been learned: people's lives are more important than military secrets."

If that moral message had been absorbed, Russian commentators noted, it was an important moment for a country where human life has long been cheap.

But since the rescue it has become clear that the Kursk's lessons have been at best partially assimilated. The incident has also highlighted that, while TV news may have been neutered during Mr Putin's presidency, Moscow newspapers retain the capacity for strident criticism, even if most do not reach far beyond the capital.

The Russian navy, it has emerged, confirmed the incident only 24 hours after the submarine became trapped, after an anonymous caller tipped off a Kamchatka radio station.

"Again there was an attempt at hiding information, at censorship," said Nikita Belykh, leader of the opposition Union of Right Forces party, yesterday.

The navy's initial explanation, moreover, was only partial. The submarine's propeller had got wrapped in a fishing net. But it occurred while the vessel was inspecting or trying to repair a $1bn (€809m) subsea antenna designed to track foreign submarines, in whose anchor cables the submarine then became enmeshed.

And after the foreign rescue crews departed - with the apparently heartfelt thanks of Sergei Ivanov, Russia's defence minister - debate raged in some political and naval circles over whether they should have been invited, or were even needed.

Captain Valery Lepetyukhin of the navy's emergency rescue service suggested to a press conference that conditions on the stranded mini-submarine had not really been all that inhospitable. The British Scorpio submarine that cut it free had merely speeded up an operation the Russians could have completed themselves, he insisted.

Dmitry Rogozin, leader of the nationalist Motherland party, told Ekho Moskvy radio that bringing in foreign rescuers had revealed the subsea antenna's location and caused "damage to national security and the Russian state".

Many newspapers spotlighted the cash-strapped state of the Russian fleet. Komsomolskaya Pravda, noting the navy's lack of rescue equipment and that a Scorpio submarine cost only $1.5m, added: "Any 'new Russian' could lose that in a bad night at the casino."

Even NTV, owned five years ago by the tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky but now under indirect state control, managed a sideswipe in a report on the Scorpio crew's triumphant return to Scotland. "Not a single Russian could spare the time to welcome the British crew home," its reporter noted."