Two crew members of the Ursa Major are missing and 14 have been rescued, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
An explosion in the engine room has sunk a Russian cargo ship called the Ursa Major in the Mediterranean Sea between Spain and Algeria, and two of the crew are missing, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
The ship, built in 2009, was controlled by Oboronlogistika, a company part of the Russian Defense Ministry's military construction operations, which earlier said it was en route to the Russian port of Vladivostok in the Far East, with two giant cranes moored at its deck.
The Foreign Ministry's crisis center said in a statement that 14 of the ship's 16 crew members had been rescued and brought to Spain, but two crew members were still missing. It did not say what caused the explosion.
The Russian embassy in Spain was quoted by Russia's official RIA news agency as saying it was investigating the circumstances of the sinking and was in contact with Spanish authorities. Oboronlogistika and SK-Yug, a company listed by LSEG as part of the group and the direct owner and operator of the vessel, declined to comment on the sinking. Both entities were sanctioned by the United States in 2022 for their ties to the Russian military, as was the Ursa Major itself.
Unverified video of the ship leaning hard on its starboard side with its bow much lower in the water than usual was filmed on December 23 by a passing ship and published on Tuesday by the Russian news website Life.ru .
Spain's maritime rescue service said it received a distress signal from the Ursa Major on Monday when it was about 92km off the coast of Almeria. He said he contacted a nearby vessel that reported bad weather conditions, a lifeboat in the water and said the Ursa Major had listed to starboard. Two ships and a helicopter were dispatched to the scene and the 14 surviving crew members were taken to the Spanish port of Cartagena. The maritime rescue service quoted the crew as saying that the ship was carrying empty containers and two port cranes on the deck. A Russian warship later arrived at the scene, it said, and took over the rescue operation.
Oboronlogistika, the ship's last owner, said in a statement on December 20 that the ship, which according to LSEG records was previously called the Sparta III, was carrying specialized port cranes to be installed in Vladivostok, as well as parts for new icebreakers. .
Unverified video footage shows two giant cranes attached to the deck. Tracking data from the LSEG ship shows that the ship left the Russian port of St. Petersburg on December 11 and was last seen sending a signal at 22:04 GMT on Monday between Algeria and Spain.
When it left St. Petersburg, it indicated that its next port of call was the Russian port of Vladivostok, and not the Syrian port of Tartous, where it had already been.
Separately, Ukraine's military intelligence service HUR — which tracks the movements of Russian ships — said in a message posted on its official Telegram channel on Monday that another Russian cargo ship, called the Sparta, had temporarily encountered technical problems off the coast of Portugal. . .
HUR said in an update that the Sparta crew had resolved the issue and the ship was en route to Syria to pick up military equipment and ammunition following the fall of Russian ally Bashar al-Assad.