No photos of the damaged ship appeared initially because, well, who would be in a position to take them? Ukraine has no real navy to speak of. And I doubt any foreign ships in the Black Sea would be willing to approach a damaged Russian cruiser, particularly with other Russian ships nearby attempting to lend aid.

And if any photos were taken by Russian sailors, Moscow would naturally do its best to suppress them so as to deny the enemy a propaganda victory on top of its naval victory.

But information wants to be free:

First photos from the initially damaged and now sunk Black Sea flagship Moskva that Russian MoD says was lost due to “fire and stormy seas”

According to some unconfirmed sources, 42 Russian sailors from the crew had been killed from the Neptune missile strikes pic.twitter.com/2FAVXhY2uY

— Dmitri Alperovitch (@DAlperovitch) April 18, 2022

This appears to be the first, unconfirmed video of the Moskva, Russia’s now-sunken Black Sea flagship, after it was hit by Ukrainian missiles.

It’s three seconds long and the last two are someone saying: “You fucking idiot! What the fuck are you doing?”

pic.twitter.com/K5xhKZ2TKi

— max seddon (@maxseddon) April 18, 2022

I phrased the headline as a question because no one’s been able to confirm for sure that that’s the Moskva before it sank. But those who know better than me say that the ship in the photos and video is indeed a Slava-class cruiser, of which there are only a few in the world. What are the odds that another Russian ship of the same type was recently on fire somewhere?

pic.twitter.com/lbSaM0ligS

— allegedly bhangmeter (@bhangm3ter) April 17, 2022

Professional sailors spent the weekend sleuthing, studying the photos and offering their best guess as to what happened. One commercial captain pointed out that the lifeboats on the port side have been deployed, which would explain how some sailors escaped alive. The thick black smoke suggests a major fire, “a result of the burning of heavy fuels or synthetic materials and incomplete combustion.” The scorch marks around the portholes indicate a bad scene below deck:

Smoke out of portholes. Hangar door open (perhaps to get a helicopter off ship).

All of these may be indications of attempts at getting help, or perhaps air, to sailors trapped below. pic.twitter.com/cC3kCg0YqJ

— Evergreen Intel (@vcdgf555) April 17, 2022

The most striking thing, though, is that the ship isn’t horribly damaged the way you might have expected. The Ukrainian missile strike obviously took a toll, but if the ensuing fire had reached the ship’s ammunition compartments we’d expect the Moskva to be shredded and to have lost buoyancy. So, while remaining on board and attempting to fight the fire would have been dangerous for the crew — what if the fire spread to the ammo while they were on deck? — there’s at least a chance they might have doused the flames and saved the ship if they had tried.

The commercial captain’s verdict: The Russians abandoned ship too soon.

3) the calm weather, reserve buoyancy, and the fact she still had power means she could possibly have been saved
4) the fact the helideck was smoke-free

For these reasons my best guess is the captain of the Moskva abandoned his ship too early.

— John Konrad V (@johnkonrad) April 18, 2022

Yesterday Russia’s defense ministry published images of what it says is the crew of the Moskva taking part in a parade in Sevastopol. Around 100 sailors are seen in the images. The ship’s typical crew was 500+. Where are the other 400?

One man posting on Facebook says his son, a conscript, was sent to serve on the Moskva as a cook. Conscripts aren’t supposed to be at war; you may remember that Putin went on Russian TV in the early days of the “special military operation” and promised that they wouldn’t deploy. The author of the Facebook post says he’s had no word from his son and wants to know why so many officers seem to have made it alive off of the Moskva when his son, who’s officially “missing,” apparently didn’t:

The father of one of the young conscripts who went missing on the Moskva missile cruiser lashes out at the Russian military who are even refusing to tell him what happened to his son. pic.twitter.com/S9m0vtzozS

— Christo Grozev (@christogrozev) April 18, 2022

The most interesting consequence of the Moskva’s sinking is that even Russian propagandists aren’t willing to accept Moscow’s official explanation that a fire aboard the ship spread to the ammunition and caused an explosion, rendering it unsalvageable. Which, at face value, seems like a positive development: Even Kremlin stooges are coming around towards believing they’re being lied to and that things are going worse for Russia than the authorities are letting on.

But they may have an ulterior motive for insisting that Ukraine sank the ship. Namely, escalation:

The even angrier tone than usual when discussing the sinking of the Moskva indicated that many commentators found Ukraine culpable. Skipping the official explanation that it caught fire, for example, Vladimir Bortko, a film director and former member of the Duma, Russia’s parliament, said on Thursday that the assault on the vessel should be treated as an assault on Russia itself.

“The special military operation has ended, it ended last night when our motherland was attacked,” he said, after asking the other panelists to remind him what Russia was calling the war. “The attack on our territory is casus belli, an absolute cause for war for real.” He suggested that possible responses included bombing Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv; the transportation networks that allowed foreign dignitaries to visit; or something more sinister: “Bomb them once and that is it.”

His ranting about war brought an admonition from Olga Skabaeeva, the host of the popular “60 Minutes” program, who said that he was talking in the context of NATO aggression against Russia. Some analysts think all the talk of NATO attacking Russia is meant to lay the groundwork for a possible general mobilization of the male population — martial law is a necessary prior step, and a declaration of martial law requires going to war or being under threat.

If Russian authorities have concluded that they can’t win without full mobilization then they need to pivot from “the war is going swimmingly” to “our nation’s honor is under attack.” Acknowledging that Ukraine, not a fire, is responsible for the sinking of the Moskva is a step towards that.

I’ll leave you with Russian television’s most notorious propagandist, Vladimir Solovyov, asking some hard questions about his own government’s apparent incompetence. I’m not sure what to make of this clip.

Vladimir Solovyov, a TV anchor known as ‘Putin’s voice’ rages at the Russian navy over the flagship’s loss

'I am furious about what happened to the Black Sea Fleet’s flagship, Moskva,'

‘How the hell did you allow the Moskva to be sunk?’ #StopRussia #StopPutin pic.twitter.com/s9PJuu8zZI

— Mario Jemic a.k.a. Apprentice (@MarioJemic) April 18, 2022