The story of the Moskva keeps getting more and more interesting.
There is a report that the relic of the “true cross” bought from a Catholic church by Russian Orthodox businessmen and given to Admiral Osipov, until now the Commander of the Black Sea Fleet, cost $40 million. The relic was installed in the chapel of the ship in a grand ceremony because the admirals believed that it would make the ship invincible.
The source of the information about the price and the ceremony is a well-connected former Russian MP who is an anti-religion and anti-Putin critic, Alexander Nevzorov.
Nevzorov, 63, lives outside Russia now.
Nevzorov questions if the wooden sliver that was the relic was actually in the 19th century metal cross in which it was supposed to have been embedded or not? If not, the money was just wasted.
According to TASS the relic was given in 2020 February by anonymous donors to Sergiy Khalyuta the Archpriest of Sebastopol who was friendly with Admiral Osipov, the commander of the Black Sea Fleet. Khalyuta claims the Admiral was going to install it in the ship’s chapel, but whether he actually did so or not, is unclear. Although the TASS report is dated 2020, other reports citing it have stated that the relic was actually given on Feb 26, 2022 to the Admiral. I suspect it is just a misreading of the original report, but I could be wrong.
But consider the propaganda value of the true cross failing to protect the flagship, named Moskva [Moscow], and that too during Easter Week in the West. Consider that the Moskva was the ship made famous by the expletive-laden defiance of the Ukrainians on Snake Island threatened by it, a defiance now memorialized in stamps with the slogan, “Russian warship go f*** yourself.” The Ukrainian ambassador to the US told Congress all 13 defiant soldiers died rather than surrender, but the Russians counted 82 Ukrainian servicemen who surrendered and within a few days the Ukrainians themselves confirmed that no one had died.
Snake Island was February 26, 2022. Two years to the day when the relic was delivered to Khalyuta.
Consider that Catholic relics are not supposed to be sold. In fact, it is illegal to do so. Was that the reason for the anonymity of the donors? How then did they buy it?
And how did Alexander Nevzorov get to know about it at the time?
What did Nevzorov also get to know that made him make this video in 2021 in which with a certainty that is startling he says a Russo-Ukrainian war will end with regime change for Russia, led by the military. His lengthy diatribe also predicts fierce Ukrainian resistance, large Russian casualties, commanders killing themselves, and the hulls of ships disintegrating as though held together only with paint.
Nevzorov a muck-raker, is a veteran media personality whose one-time show “600 seconds” exposed corruption and crime in the early 1990s, especially that brought on by communist apparatchiks. He is a self-described monarchist.
He is also the first major media personality to be probed under new legislation banning spreading false stories about the Russian military operation. Nevzorov was charged on March 23rd for publishing the false story that the Russians had bombed the Mariupol maternity hospital.
The publications were accompanied by inaccurate photographs of civilians affected by the shelling,” investigators said, adding that the pictures had been first published by Ukrainian media.
Nevzorov does not believe there are Nazis in Ukraine
and he is a supporter of Alexander Navalny, another Putin critic who has recently been jailed for fraud.
He confesses that he hates Orthodoxy, especially the conservative beliefs of Dostoevsky, whose ideas he calls Russian Nazism.
An interesting person to know all about how an Orthodox relic got into the Moskva, sank with it, and thereby discredited the “Russian Nazis”…