Crew of Russian Sub Is Rescued

The crew of a Russian mini-submarine trapped for days beneath the Bering Sea was rescued today after a remote-controlled British “Scorpio” underwater craft helped disentangle the vessel from cables and fishing ropes.

The dramatic rescue came after a race against time, as even optimistic estimates had predicted that oxygen would run out by tonight for the seven men who had been stuck in the cramped, chilly vessel since Thursday.

“The mini-sub has surfaced, and all seven crew members are alive,” Russian Pacific Fleet spokesman Igor Dygalo announced this afternoon. “They left the mini-sub unassisted and boarded the rescue boat.”

Officials said the crew members were able to open the submarine hatch by themselves.

Dygalo credited the success of the operation to the joint efforts of Russian and foreign rescuers.

The 43-foot Russian AS-28 submersible became entangled Thursday shortly after setting out on a training mission off the coast of the Kamchatka peninsula.

It got stuck in old fishing nets along with hoses and cables understood to be part of a system of top-secret underwater antennae for Russia’s anti-submarine monitoring efforts along the peninsula.

Russian authorities, seeking to avert a replay of a submarine tragedy in the Barents Sea five years ago that left 118 sailors dead, soon requested international help. Several countries responded, including Britain, the United States and Japan. Russians waited anxiously as the rescue efforts played out.

“It’s such a relief, and I feel so much better now,” said Nadezhda Turkevich, 57, a pensioner here in the capital of the Kamchatka region.

“We’ve been thinking about them. We knew how hard it was for them down there. Now they have to get back to normal life and forget about all that. We were waiting for news and praying. Our prayers seem to have worked,” she said.

Before the sub surfaced at 4:15 p.m., the rescue effort had seen hopes rise and fall.

Early today, with hours to go before foreign mini-subs and divers could arrive at the site, Russian military officials had launched an emergency attempt to lift the submersible into shallower depths, hoping to ease the work for the foreign rescuers.

Working in the early morning hours today, rescuers tried to slice off two 60-ton anchors tying down the antennae in which the submersible was trapped, then raise the vessel using ropes stretched around its belly.

It was not immediately clear whether they had succeeded in severing the anchors from the cables.

By midmorning, the British Scorpio -- which had been flown to Kamchatka and taken by ship to the site 10 miles offshore -- was able to dive toward the mini-sub.

At midafternoon it was reported that the Scorpio had nearly succeeded in freeing the vessel, with all metal cables cut loose and only some ropes from old fishing nets remaining to be cleared away.

Then, however, the Scorpio was forced to surface, its task incomplete, to deal with what was described by officials as some kind of damage or malfunction. After a short delay, the Scorpio dived again and was able to fully free the Russian vessel.

The commander of the mini-sub was identified as 25-year-old Vyacheslav Milachevsky, a lieutenant-captain who had commanded six previous submersible missions. He is married and has twin girls who will be 2 in September.

The incident had brought back memories of one of the worst tragedies to strike the Russian navy -- almost exactly five years ago -- when the nuclear submarine Kursk suffered explosions on board and sank. Several of the 118 crew members survived for hours after the accident, knocking on the hull of the vessel for help. The Russian military’s delay in seeking international help was blamed for ending any hope of rescuing the men.

This time, the Russians sought assistance within a day after the mini-sub got stuck, and British and U.S. rescue vehicles arrived in Kamchatka by late Saturday.

The British Scorpio got to the scene this morning, but two U.S. Navy “Super Scorpio” mini-submarines were still on a ship heading toward the scene this afternoon.

The Pentagon also sent 30 sailors from the North Island Naval Air Station in Coronado, near San Diego, to aid the rescue mission.

The British Scorpio is a somewhat smaller version of the American Super Scorpio.

The U.S. Navy also dispatched a Deep Drone 8000, capable of even deeper dives.

Rear Adm. Vladimir Pepelyaev, deputy head of the Russian navy’s headquarters, expressed appreciation for the foreign help. “I would like to thank our British colleagues for their aid in saving the crew,” he told reporters.

Officials said the crew received medical aid aboard the Alages ship. Pepelyaev said the crew looked tired, but their psychological condition was satisfactory, Russia’s Interfax new agency reported.

The men were soon to be transferred to another naval ship, Razliv, carrying Russian Defense Minister Sergei B. Ivanov, who had been sent to the region by President Vladimir V. Putin to oversee the rescue.

After the mini-sub became stuck Thursday, officials had weighed different rescue strategies, including an underwater transfer of the crew. Russia has submersibles with docking stations that could allow for such a transfer, but it appeared that none of them were deployed in the Pacific Fleet.

A second mini-sub that was supposed to have accompanied the trapped vehicle as a potential rescue vessel did not go because it was in a state of disrepair, Kommersant newspaper reported.

Dygalo, the Russian navy spokesman, said in a telephone interview Saturday evening that authorities had tried to devise some means of delivering oxygen supplies to the crew but could not figure out how to do so.

Over the last few days, a picture began to emerge of how the submersible, which has a shielded propeller designed to avoid underwater entanglements, reached its predicament.

Kommersant reported that the sub set out at 11:48 a.m. Thursday on a training mission aimed at changing one of the segments of the underwater hydro-acoustic tracking system that was designed to detect U.S. submarines approaching the top-secret military installations at Kamchatka.

“This area is stuffed with secrets. It is home for strategic nuclear submarines,” retired Adm. Eduard Baltin, former Russian Black Sea Fleet commander, told the Interfax news agency.

The mission was supposed to take two to three hours. The AS-28 had submerged once and re-emerged, and was on its second submersion, about an hour after departure, when it issued a distress signal.

Pepelyaev, deputy head of the Russian navy’s headquarters, told reporters that a small, remote-controlled Tiger sub was able to display how one end of the AS-28 became entangled in the fishing net -- although Kommersant reported there was normally no fishing in the area.

“On the basis of information from the Tiger apparatus,” Pepelyaev said, “we believe that it first got caught in the fragments of fishing nets and then, as it tried to free itself from the nets, got hooked on a hose, and the cable to pull that hose wound round itself in the area of the screw and rudder section amidships.”

Most analysts agreed it would have been impossible to evacuate the vessel at its original depth of 600 feet, where the water pressure is equal to about 20 atmospheres.

“They would have to wear special gear, and they can’t breathe normal oxygen; they would have to use helium at such depths,” said Igor Kudrik, an expert on the Russian navy with the Bellona Foundation, an environmental organization.

“What will happen is their lungs will blow up if they try to come up,” he said.

Even so, said Yevgeny Chernov, a retired vice admiral with the Russian navy, it should have been possible for deep-water divers to reach the mini-sub and perhaps help free the vessel.

“It became obvious, when the Kursk submarine tragedy happened, that we don’t have deep-water divers. It’s a strange thing to see, when there is no one who is equipped and trained as a deep-water diver. Two hundred meters is a toy depth for a deep-water diver. If there is even one diver of such qualification, why wasn’t he used?”

“All of this is really sad,” he said. “History is testing us, but it seems that we are not yet ready for such tests.”

Russian analysts said the submersible was probably equipped with so-called carbon dioxide scrubbers to prevent a potentially lethal buildup of carbon dioxide in the vessel even before oxygen ran out.

The mini-sub, these analysts say, would most probably have been equipped with a five-day supply of plates that through a special chemical agent can absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it to an equal quantity of oxygen.

“Each plate normally works four hours for one person. As soon as all the plates are used, the level of carbon dioxide starts increasing,” said Yuri Senatsky, a retired admiral and former head of the Russian navy’s Rescue Service.

Holley reported from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and Murphy from Moscow.