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All radio contact with the crew is lost. They want to feel they belong to a great nation which is respected, possibly feared. All the seamen are dead.The following day in Vidyayevo, the small coastal navy village and home base for the Kursk, the crew members' families gather and Putin faces the criticisms of tearful widows.A day of national mourning is declared on August 23, but the bereaved families refuse to take part.Putin says he bears "a feeling of full responsibility and a feeling of guilt for this tragedy".The Russian prosecutor's office concludes its investigation in July 2002 declaring no one can be held responsible.It says the accident resulted from an explosion in one of the submarine's torpedo tubes caused by volatile fuel and the crew could not be saved. Though almost 20 years have passed since the Kursk catastrophe in August 2000, British submariner Commodore David Russell still asks himself if he could have saved those men. They were at the bottom of the Barents Sea. They died at the latest eight hours after the blast.A scribbled note by one officer, discovered in October 2000 in the man's pocket when rescue workers raised his body from the sub, provides cruel evidence that at least 23 sailors survived several hours after the explosion, having tried to seek safety in the vessel's rear.A father and essential worker died of COVID-19. All radio contact with the crew is lost. If you think about it, we’ve definitely seen more of him since.”We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism.We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Read our community guidelines in full RT spoke to the widow of one of the sailors who perished in the tragedy. Die K-141 Kursk (russisch Курск) war ein 1990/91 gebautes, mit Marschflugkörpern bestücktes russisches Atom-U-Boot des Projektes 949A (NATO-Code Oscar-II-Klasse). “He received a high degree of criticism for not having a more visible hands-on role. The film follows the 2000 K-141 Kursk submarine disaster and the governmental negligence that followed. The film could even have played even more on the critical downsizing of the Russian Navy, because psychologically that was important for everyone involved.”What sank the Kursk was, in the immediate aftermath, the subject of various conspiracy theories – some propagated by the Russians themselves – which claimed everything from a collision with US spy vessel to unexploded Second World War mines and mystery missiles aboard the sub had caused the tragedy. The chances of a successful rescue "are very small, but they exist", he says.On August 21, after 30 hours, Norwegian divers manage to open the submarine's airlock. With Matthias Schoenaerts, Léa Seydoux, Peter Simonischek, August Diehl. We’ve seen that with Putin in the last few years.”“It is odd that he’s not portrayed,” says Grove. The day the nuclear submarine ‘Kursk’ sank in the Barents Sea during a maritime exercise in August 2000 became a drama for the whole nation. Find out more On August 12, 2000, the Kursk nuclear submarine, pride of Russia's Northern Fleet, sank after a torpedo exploded, and the fate of its 118 crew captivated the nation until the tragic conclusion nine days later.Here is a look back at the events 20 years ago in what remains the Russian navy's worst-ever disaster.On that Saturday morning, the Kursk, a huge 154-meter-long (508 feet) submarine, takes part in naval exercises in the Barents Sea on the borders between Russia and Norway.At 11:28 am local time (0728 GMT) Norwegian seismographers register a major explosion followed by a second more powerful one two minutes later.The Russian navy locates the vessel at dawn on Sunday. The official report was put together by Vladimir Ustinov and he admits that was the most likely cause.”“Nobody is sure for how long they survived,” says Grove. They’d been through some tumultuous times since then fall of the Berlin Wall and crash of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The interior of the Kursk is completely flooded.