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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

> The missile cruiser "Moskva" sank while being towed to its destination in a storm due to damage to the hull received due to a fire from the detonation of ammunition. [Translated]

So many different ways to avoid saying that a Ukrainian missile sank it.

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A missile cruiser is going to have a lot of hypergolics on board. If you don’t know what you’re doing that’s an easy way to blow yourself up, like what happened with the submarine Kursk.

So it’s plausible that it wasn’t the Ukrainians, but then again it would surely be more honourable to get blown up by a Ukrainian missile than by your own incompetence. So if Ukraine is falsely claiming credit they should be taking it as a propaganda godsend.

Ukraine announced the strike before Russia announced anything was wrong though.

That’s probably right. It just sounds so outlandish to make up a lie to make yourself look bad.

Maybe there’s something about Russian military culture that the rest of us don’t understand, where being killed by the enemy is a much bigger loss of face than killing yourself.

Their current war is based on the propaganda of Russian superiority over Ukrainians, military superiority specifically since Russians built their whole modern ideology on winning WWII. Admitting that Ukrainians are capable of anything is therefore undercutting this foundational national idea.

US missile cruisers (and destroyers) don't have hypergolic fuels onboard because all the missiles have solid fuels, but maybe Russia is different.

Good point. From what I can find their missiles are indeed solid as well. But they do have hydrogen peroxide torpedoes, which could have been the culprit, as with Kursk.

Why would it have lots of hypergolics on board?

For own anti-ship missiles carried on deck?

Those are turbojet cruise missiles.

Cruise missiles breath air and burn jet fuel.

There were a lot of reports many hours before the russians acknowledged anything that the Ukrainians did it. From many different sources. Then there was the SOS captured by hundreds of regular users on the websdr source. Also, there was a captured conversion by the russian military discussing how it was done – Bayraktar took out the ship's radar and took attention away from the missiles that were launched from the shore.

Everything fits, there's no reason to believe russian propaganda now. They are just trying to save their non-existent face.

First claims of missile strike was from Ukrainian side way before even radio monitoring OSINT kicked in. So it seems that Ukrainians knew about that cigarette fire on the ship the moment it started 50-150 km from the shore and reported it as their war victory. Coincidence? I don't think so.

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