Putin, Medvedev ignore Kursk date

Memorial events were held all over Russia yesterday to commemorate the 118 sailors who died when the nuclear powered submarine “Kursk” sank in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000. Navy ships of the Northern Fleet lowered their flags and sounded their sirens at 11:44 p.m. – the exact time of the blast that destroyed the sub.

But officials chose to ignore the date, relatives of dead sailors said, The Moscow Times report.

- We hoped that someone from the Defense Ministry or the Navy’s staff would contact us for the 10th anniversary. We thought that someone from the country’s authorities would come to commemorate the memory of our boys. But alas, looks like they don’t think death of 118 submariners is a big tragedy, said Sofia Dudko, mother of the Kursk’s first mate, Sergei Dudko, to the newspaper.

Read also: Kursk- 10 years after

As far as BarentsObserver can tell, neither President Dmitry Medvedev nor Prime Minister Vladimir Putin took part in any memorial events yesterday, at least there is no media coverage of this.

There are no comments about the accident of the anniversary on neither Medvedev’s nor Putin’s web sites.

Vladimir Putin was newly elected president at the time of the Kursk disaster. He has been much criticized for waiting five days before calling off his holiday after the Kursk blast. On September 8, 2000, he made a now-notorious comment about the situation on “Larry King Live,” answering a question about what happened to the submarine with the curt remark, “It sunk.”