Kursk - A Strange And Unsettling Coincidence

On Saturday 17th June, I idly and randomly flipped through a list of films to watch on Amazon Prime and quickly decided that ‘Kursk - The Last Mission’ looked interesting.

A few minutes into the film, I realised it was based on actual events, which I vaguely recollect from watching the news 23 years ago. By the end of the film, I was knocked out; it is powerful and deeply moving and documents the sinking of the Russian submarine The Kursk, during a routine naval exercise, due to a chemically unstable torpedo, plus the subsequent failed rescue mission, executed first by the Russian navy and then with help from the British and Norwegians.

There’s a scene in the film where a Russian naval officer involved in the rescue laments the fact that the outdated and poorly maintained Russian submersible cannot form a seal to the Kursk’s hull, that the batteries aboard are depleted too quickly and take too long to recharge and that more modern equipment was recently sold off to the west to aid in the underwater exploration of the recently discovered Titanic.

Then on Monday June 19th, a tourist submersible exploring the Titanic wreck disappeared and a search and rescue mission was initiated which was a race against time before the oxygen aboard ran out. The Titanic is situated in the North Atlantic at a depth of 12 and a half thousand feet; the Kursk was in relatively shallow water in the Barents Sea, between 300 and 400 feet below the surface. If the rescue of the sailors aboard the Kursk was a challenging exercise, which ultimately ended in failure due to incompetence, lack of modern equipment and vacillation due to lingering post Cold War concerns about spying on the part of the Russian authorities, the rescue of those aboard the Titanic tourist submersible will be a vastly greater challenge, if the vehicle is damaged and not able to surface.

It’s rather an eerie case of synchronicity in my opinion. Looking further into the circumstances which surrounded the sinking of the Kursk, it becomes even more eerie. Like the Titanic, the double-hulled Kursk, the pride of the Russian Northern Fleet, was thought to be unsinkable. Both vessels were elevated to almost mythical status and both ended up at the bottom of the sea, with the loss of many hundreds of lives.

Even more remarkable is the fact that Putin was only 4 months into his presidency in 2000 when the Kursk sank on August 12, 2000 and it was a British naval commander, Commodore David Russell, who took the initiative and offered British naval assistance, even before getting official authorisation to do so from the British Government. With the current manufactured animosity of the British government towards Putin and Russia, can you imagine this happening now, if a similar situation arose? Putin back then was in no hurry to rescue the stricken sailors aboard the Kursk. He was on holiday at the time and didn’t immediately return to the Kremlin. Only after 5 days did he agree to allow the British and Norwegians to help in the rescue. But it was too late. The sailors perished. Commodore Russell was a remarkable man by all accounts:

On the morning of Monday, August 14, Russia’s main television channel broke its schedule with a special announcement on “malfunctions aboard the Kursk” confirming that the submarine was “lying on the bed of the Barents sea.” The Northern Fleet Press Service reported: “The crew . . . is alive and communications with them are being maintained . . . using tapping methods.” The news was immediately broadcast around the world.

Commodore David Russell had just arrived at his desk in Northwood, London, when his aide told him to turn on the radio, and they caught the story. Russell noted the time—8:05—and instinctively, began contingency planning. He knew that, to rescue anyone from a sunken submarine, time was of the essence. With neither ministerial clearance from London nor a Russian request for assistance, Russell ordered the United Kingdom Submarine Rescue Service (UKSRS) to transfer to Scotland and identified a suitable vessel in the Barents and a port in Norway where the UKSRS team could join it. He also put in an executive order to lease an Antonov cargo plane from a commercial transport firm to carry the necessary equipment.

Russell felt no technical, budgetary, or political constraints to the rescue mission, only the pressure to act quickly. First, with an annual budget varying between GBP 500,000 and 1 million ($0.8–1.6 million), UKSRS was adequately equipped and funded and its personnel was more than adequately trained to carry out a rescue mission in the relatively shallow waters of the Barents. Second, while politicians at Number 10 were debating whether or not to make an official offer of assistance to Russia, Russell was convinced that there was no harm in “stealing a march on events” by putting UKSRS into a state of readiness. Third, Russell acted out of a deeply felt conviction that he, as a senior naval officer, had sufficient latitude:

There is a tradition in the Royal Navy of doing what you think is right, taking the initiative, and being prepared to justify it later, rather than doing nothing and being unable to justify your inaction. The great test is: Can you sleep at night? Hence, to some extent this was an example of what Royal Navy senior officers were expected to do—the right thing. I did not feel the need to seek orders from the UK. It was sufficient to know that my mission was to rescue survivors if I could and help the Russians. Besides, if there isn’t something which literally tells you that you can’t do something, then if you do it, you’re—in theory—not breaking a rule. Of course, the flip side to this is that if you got it wrong, it was your head on the block.

Russell quoted the “law of the sea” as another trigger of his actions:

All navies, unless at war, have a duty to help one another. This is an unshakable value for those who go to sea, even more so for submariners.

Finally, Russell was convinced that his team was the right team to carry out the mission:

It felt like my whole life had been a preparation for this moment. It’s because we are submariners, we understand what the conditions in the Kursk would be like. We knew that it would be freezing cold. We knew there would be water in the compartment. We knew it would be pitch-dark. We knew that the atmosphere would be lacking in oxygen and building up in carbon-dioxide, the pressure would be increasing, their time was limited. It’s been part of our submarine training. So we were the experts, if you like.

I hope that those people aboard the Titanic submersible survive. I wish we lived in a world where governments placed more value on the lives of their citizens. I wish we lived in a world where the powers that be do not deliberately manufacture hostility and mistrust between nations. I wish we lived in a world where there were a lot more people like Commodore David Russell.