RUSSIA: International rescuers were last night racing against time to save seven Russian sailors trapped on board a stranded mini-submarine which has become disabled off the Pacific coast.
Ships, planes and emergency diving crews were converging on the location where the mini-submarine became entangled in fishing nets. The crew's air supply is expected to run out this afternoon.
Two Russian ships at the scene, using long metal drags, pulled the submarine one kilometre closer to safety last night.
"We have hooked the whole tangle, including our submersible object. In all this time it has been moved almost a kilometre," Admiral Viktor Fyodorov, commander of the Pacific Fleet, told NTV television.
"We are continuing our work to get her to a shallower place . . . But whether we will manage it, I cannot say."
The AS-28 mini-sub ran into trouble late on Thursday when its propeller became tangled in fishing nets. The vessel, itself a rescue submarine, sank to a depth of 623 feet during a military exercise off the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia's far east.
"The sailors have enough air to keep them running for around 22 hours," chief naval spokesman Alexander Dygalo said yesterday evening. "I hope there will be enough time for the rescue operation to succeed."
Communication has been established with the crew and they have been told to switch to minimal energy consumption.
Confusion continues to surround the accident, with conflicting statements from naval headquarters at first saying that the crew had five days of oxygen before Pacific Fleet commander Admiral Viktor Dmitrivev said that the vessel had only two days of air from the time it became entangled.
Four vessels are heading to the scene from Japan and the United States and Britain have both flown lightweight unmanned submarines to Russia. The US, which is leading the international rescue effort, last night flew two unmanned mini-subs to Russia and hopes to have them at the dive site by mid-morning today.
The two Super Scorpio mini-submarines are remote-controlled and have robotic arms capable of cutting through inch-thick steel cable. They were flown from San Diego to the Russian naval base at Petropavlosk. From there, a Russian ship was due to take them and their crews some 30 miles to the dive site this morning.
However, these mini-subs cannot rescue the Russian sailors. They will only be able to cut away the tangled netting, which might enable the craft to float to the surface. "It is very quickly deployable, but it is not a submersible that would be able to take an individual from one sub-environment to another sub-environment," Pentagon spokesman Lt-Cmdr Joe Carpenter told The Irish Times.
A spokesman for Japan's defence ministry said that ships were steaming to the scene with advanced rescue equipment and diving craft but would take three days to arrive.
The mini-sub incident has occurred almost exactly five years after the loss of Russia's Kursk nuclear submarine, which blew up and sank in the northern Barents Sea in August 2000 with the loss of all 118 crew. And it follows an explosion aboard a decommissioned nuclear submarine last Monday which killed two workmen in the Severdorsk naval yard on the White Sea.
This accident and the inability of Russia's navy to stage a rescue highlights the grim state of Moscow's armed forces. Crippling cash shortages and the drain caused by the war in Chechnya mean safety measures are often compromised.