Rejoicing Over Crew’s Return

It was the moment Yelena Milashevskaya had been waiting for since learning late last week that her husband and six crewmates were trapped in a mini-submarine under the Bering Sea.

On Sunday evening, a van carrying Vyacheslav Milashevsky and the other rescued sailors sped up to the gate of a military hospital here in the capital of Russia’s Kamchatka region. Milashevskaya spotted her husband, he saw her, and they silently but furiously waved to each other through the closed window. Then she nearly broke into tears.

“I danced, I was glad,” Milashevskaya said in remarks broadcast later on Russian television. “I cried and I danced for joy.”

The crew, stuck in the cold submersible since Thursday, had been rescued earlier Sunday after a remote-controlled British “Scorpio” underwater craft cut through cables and fishing nets that had ensnared the mini-sub. Rescuers had raced against time, as even optimistic estimates predicted that oxygen would run out by Sunday night.

When the mini-sub surfaced, the crew was evacuated to a ship for medical aid. Arriving early Sunday evening at the port here, Milashevsky, commander of the crew, gave a military salute to well-wishers before stepping onto the gangway.

“Slava, how are you?” a reporter asked.

“Very well,” he replied.

“Did you believe you would be saved?”

“Of course,” Milashevsky said, very quietly.

Another crew member, asked how he felt, replied: “OK. OK now.”

Asked how it had been on board the mini-sub, the crew member, who did not give his name, replied: “Cold. Cold. Very.”

Temperatures in the craft were reportedly about 40 degrees, and the men had worn thermal suits to protect themselves from the cold. They had been told to lie flat and breathe lightly to conserve oxygen during the long dark wait, with lights turned off to save power.

The 43-foot Russian AS-28 sub became entangled Thursday in old fishing nets along with hoses and cables understood to be part of a top-secret underwater antenna system.

Eager to avoid a replay of the Kursk submarine tragedy five years ago, which left 118 sailors dead after delays in seeking foreign aid, Russia quickly requested international help in this incident. Several countries responded, including Britain, the United States and Japan.

The British craft was the first foreign underwater vehicle to reach the scene. It freed the mini-sub just as a ship loaded with two U.S. Navy “Super Scorpios” was about to set out from the harbor here, said Garth Sinclair, 37, a chief hospital corpsman who was among 30 U.S. sailors sent from North Island Naval Air Station in Coronado, near San Diego, to help in the mission.

Sinclair said four members of the American team had gone on ahead of the Super Scorpios and were present to assist the operation using the British vehicle. “I’m ecstatic that we were able to participate and help out,” Sinclair said.

Defense Minister Sergei B. Ivanov, sent by Russian President Vladimir V. Putin to supervise the rescue operation from a navy ship, praised the international cooperation, saying, “We have seen in deeds, not in words, what the brotherhood of the sea means.” Russian TV showed him shaking his fists in jubilation when the red-and-white striped mini-sub surfaced.

Russian Vice Adm. Oleg Burtsev expressed gratitude to all nations that helped.

The rescue succeeded “not only thanks to the efforts of our navy, but also the efforts of those people and those states, the heads of state and navy commanders with whom we cooperate -- primarily the British navy and the naval forces of the United States of America and Japan,” Burtsev said on state TV.

The willingness of Russia’s military to seek foreign assistance drew praise but also raised concerns about the need for outside help. “We think that the Pacific Fleet command was absolutely right when it called foreign specialists for help instead of keeping ‘a military secret,’ ” Vyacheslav Popov, deputy chairman of the defense and security committee of the upper house of parliament, told the Russian news agency Itar-Tass.

“Salvation of people in distress is a sacred duty, so we should act together.”

He expressed regret, however, that Russia was not equipped to rescue the crew. “We still cannot do without foreign assistance when it is a matter of deep-water problems,” he said.

Pavel Felgenhauer, a military analyst, said the rescue was a “good exercise” for the British and the Americans.

“For them to work on a real case instead of taking dry exercises is good. But it is not good for us,” he said. “If we want to contract the British to save our sailors in the future, OK, we should sign a formal contract. Otherwise we have to develop something of our own.”