FLASH
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The ship was en route to Syria to collect military equipment and ammunition following the fall of close Russian ally Bashar al-Assad.
An explosion has sunk a Russian cargo ship called the Ursa Major in the Mediterranean Sea between Spain and Algeria with two of its crew missing, the Russian foreign ministry said.
The ship, built in 2009, was controlled by Oboronlogistika, a company that is part of the Russian defense ministry's military construction operations, which had previously said it was en route to the far eastern Russian port of Vladivostok with two giant cranes. porters struck on her deck.
The foreign ministry's crisis center said in a statement that 14 of the ship's 16 crew members had been rescued and taken to Spain, but two crew members were still missing.
The Russian ministry did not provide any details on what caused the explosion.
Russia's embassy in Spain was quoted by Russian state news agency RIA as saying it was looking into the circumstances of the sinking and was in contact with authorities in Spain.
Oboronlogistika and SK-Yug, a company LSEG lists as part of the group and the ship's direct owner and operator, declined to comment on the sinking. Both entities were placed under US sanctions in 2022 for their ties to the Russian military, as was Ursa Major itself.
Two ships and a helicopter were sent to the scene and the 14 surviving crew members were flown to the Spanish port of Cartagena. The maritime rescue service quoted the crew as saying the ship was carrying empty containers as well as two harbor cranes on deck. A Russian warship later arrived at the scene and took over the rescue operations.
Tracking data for the LSEG vessel shows that the vessel left the Russian port of St Petersburg on December 11 and was last seen sending a signal at 10pm on Monday between Algeria and Spain.
Leaving St Petersburg, she had indicated that her next port of call was the Russian port of Vladivostok, rather than the Syrian port of Tartous, to which she had gone previously.
Separately, Ukraine's HUR military intelligence service - which tracks the movements of Russian ships - said in a post on its official Telegram channel on Monday that another Russian cargo ship, named Sparta, had temporarily encountered technical problems off the coast of Portugal.
HUR said in an update that Sparta's crew had fixed the problem and that the ship was en route to Syria to collect military equipment and ammunition after the fall of close Russian ally Bashar al-Assad.
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