RUSSIA: The navy was yet again ill-prepared to deal with a crisis situation, writes Chris Stephen
They were images that were seared into the minds of the Kremlin. Five years ago TV screens across Russia showed the wives of the sailors aboard the doomed Kursk submarine begging to know why Moscow had refused offers of foreign help for five days.
The resulting furore was a disaster for President Vladimir Putin, and it was a mistake he was determined not to repeat.
Yet such a scenario seemed to be repeating itself last Thursday. Almost five years to the day after the Kursk went down, news came of a submarine again trapped far below the surface. And once again the navy declined foreign help.
"We can handle it," was the message from crusty admirals who joined the navy during the cold war, when secrecy was more important than the lives of ordinary sailors.
But the difference, this time around, was Sergie Ivanov. Russia's defence minister, a former KGB colonel and long-time friend of President Putin, seemed determined not to endure a second Kursk.
Russia is a member of an international group of navies pledged to help each other in times of crisis, and on Thursday Ivanov demanded the navy ring the bell. A meeting was held that night with Russian liaison officers at America's Pearl Harbour naval HQ in Hawaii, while calls went out through British and Japanese embassies in Moscow.
This decision to get help early almost certainly meant the difference between life and death for the trapped sailors.
Yet even as the crisis unfolded, Russia's navy brass insisted the foreign help would not be needed. "Nobody wanted to use this help," Moscow journalist Anna Shpakova told The Irish Times. "There was a lot of help, but all the military guys said we will do it ourselves."
They could not. After three days of fumbling effort, it was a British mini-sub that cut the cables that had ensnared the little submarine.
Meanwhile, confusion emanated from Russian naval headquarters. The navy first said the sub had five days of air, then admitting it might in fact be two. Then it said the craft had been freed by Russian ships dragging the ocean with steel cables. Then it admitted the sub was probably still stuck.
"Just as with the Kursk, the real operation to rescue the submersible began more than a day after the accident," thundered Moscow's Kommersant newspaper. "In both cases, the navy simply proved ill-prepared to carry out the operation."
One change from the Kursk tragedy was the flow of information. The crew's families themselves were kept informed. One Russian TV crew interviewed the wife of the sub captain on the doorstep of her home, where she told them the navy was phoning her with updates every 15 minutes.
President Putin has now ordered an inquiry, which is likely to focus on why, once more, the navy tried to delay getting out the bad news.
It will also want to know why the Pacific Fleet held its summer manoeuvres without deploying a rescue craft. Accidents during naval exercises are inevitable, but most navies know this and make sure rescue vessels are deployed.
Russia's admirals are likely to reply that budget cuts mean they are forever having to squeeze a quart into a pint pot.
Mr Putin promised, after the Kursk disaster, that safety measures would be improved. But Russia's million-strong armed forces continues to get by on a €17.3 million budget, just under half that of the UK. Most of this spending is soaked up in the continuing war in Chechnya, leaving the navy a low priority.
In fact, the only danger the navy now poses to its former NATO adversaries is an environmental one, as concerns mount over the 84 rusting nuclear submarines left to rot at their moorings.
And incompetence rather than penny-pinching may be to blame for this present crisis. It surely would not have cost a fortune for the navy, which planned this exercise far in advance, to have deployed a second mini-sub in the area in case an accident happened to the first.
One thing seems clear: while Russia itself has undergone chaotic somersaults in moving from communism to a form of capitalism in the 15 years since the Soviet Union was dissolved, its armed forces remain trapped in cold-war thinking, blissfully unaware that the outside world has moved on.