A unique and difficult-to-replace sea transport ship, operated through the Kremlin’s military logistics company, sank in the Mediterranean Sea near Spain on Christmas Eve. The loss of the 13,000-tonne M/V Ursa Major is a serious blow to Oboronlogistika and Russia’s long-suffering shipbuilding industry.
The German-built Ursa Major was just 15 years old and young for an auxiliary shipment when it suffered what the Russian Crisis Management Center described as an “explosion” in its engine room. The ship detected the directory to starboard before finally sinking. Nearby shipping rescued two of her 16 crew members.
Ursa Major was a special asset. She was Oboronlogistika’s biggest ship, and also one of the few vessels on the company registry with roll-on/roll-off ramps for vehicles to drive directly into and out of her hold as well as top-mounted cranes for vertical loading. “There simply isn’t a larger universal RO/RO-LO/LO-class cargo ship (capable of horizontal and vertical loading),” one Russian blogger moaned in a missive translated by Estonian analyst WarTranslated.
The Big Dipper once supported the Russian garrison in Syria, which is now in peril as a new regime takes hold in the war-torn country. But he would have been assigned to the project when it sank. The RO/RO shipment left St. Petersburg in mid-December for Vladivostok, on the Russian Pacific coast. She crossed the English Channel on 16 December along with her fellow Russian auxiliary Sparta and the Russian naval corvette RFS Soobrazitelnyy.
A Royal Navy Type 23 frigate shadowed the Russians on the passage. Later, a Portuguese air force Lockheed Martin P-3 patrol plane checked in.
Visible on Ursa Major’s deck at the time: a pair of heavy cranes. The cranes and a pair of special hatches for nuclear-powered icebreakers were reportedly Ursa Major’s main cargo as she sailed south through the Med toward the Suez Canal, following the southerly route to Vladivostok rather than the Northern Sea Route in order to avoid winter ice. The unwieldy cranes may have made Ursa Major top-heavy, potentially contributing to her loss.
“With the ship, the cranes destined for the Vladivostok terminal and the luxurious hatches of the icebreakers sank to the bottom,” the blogger complains. “The task of the Big Dipper in the Far East is to satisfy the objectives of the State, similar to the “development” of port infrastructures and the “Northern Sea Route”, which are now manifestly disturbed. “
Sources:
1. RATE
2. WarTranslated
3. WarshipCam
4. Portuguese air force
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