Russian Sub Rescue Continues

Frantic efforts continued Friday with little progress to save the 118 servicemen aboard a Russian nuclear submarine that has been stranded on the floor of the Barents Sea since last weekend.

President Vladimir Putin has announced that he would leave for Moscow later Friday, cutting short his stay in Crimea, Ukraine, where he was attending an informal summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

The announcement came amid rising criticism of his decision not to cut short his vacation in the Black Sea resort of Sochi and of Moscow's initial rejection of foreign help in rescuing the sailors of the Kursk, which went down during a naval exercise last Saturday.

There are still conflicting versions on what caused the tragedy. While Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov said the sub had collided with a heavy object, the commander of the Northern Fleet, Admiral Vyacheslav Popov, said the sinking could also be caused by an explosion inside the vessel.

Authorities said the Kursk carries no nuclear weapons and that the nuclear reactors aboard have been shut down.

As the Russian military confront repeated failure in attempts to dock its rescue vessels with the submarine, hopes for the sailors' safe return are becoming more and more slim.

Signs of life on board have not been registered since last Monday, but the rescuers hope that submariners are lying low to conserve oxygen and strength.

Popov, the fleet commander, said attempts to search for and find the submarine's crew began immediately after it failed to respond to radio signals at a predetermined time.

"We did not waste a single minute or hour in starting the rescue operation," the admiral said.

Meanwhile, Admiral Eduard Baltin, a former commander of the Black Sea Fleet, suggested Friday that the Kursk might have suffered a collision with a U.S. submarine.

Baltin used to command Division 41 of missile-carrying submarines under project 667 of the Russian Northern Fleet, the Interfax news agency reported.

"I spent three hours at the computer modeling the situation and arrived at this conclusion: the Kursk submarine did not hit a dry freight ship or an ice-breaker, even if they were very deep in the water. It hit a U.S. submarine," Baltin said.

The Russian Navy headquarters have refrained from making any comments on the Kursk disaster scenario suggested by Baltin, Interfax said.

While the nation and the whole world hope for the sailors' safe return to the surface, the relatives of those aboard Kursk are having an especially hard time.

The Russian government decided Friday to provide 500,000 rubles (18,031 U.S. dollars) to help those families who arrived in Murmansk, the city near the site of the accident.

Many families came to Murmansk without enough money and they were not expecting to stay there so long, and some of the people who traveled to Murmansk spent literally the family's last resources, a government session on the rescue efforts was told.



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