INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
was damaged while undergoing repairs in the north of the country after the floating dock holding it sank in the early hours of Tuesday
morning and a crane crashed onto its deck.The Admiral Kuznetsov has seen action in Russia's military campaign in Syria in support of
President Bashar al-Assad with its planes carrying out air strikes against rebel forces.It was being overhauled on one of the world's
biggest floating docks in the icy waters of the Kola Bay near Murmansk close to where Russia's Northern Fleet is based and was due to go
back into service in 2021.Maria Kovtun, Murmansk's governor, said in a statement that a rescue operation had been launched and 71 people
evacuated after the floating dock holding the ship had begun to sink.The warship had been successfully extracted from the dock before it
completely sank, she said.Investigators, who said they had opened a criminal investigation into the incident that would look at whether
safety rules had been violated, said one person was missing and four others were being treated for hypothermia after being plucked out of
the water.Alexei Rakhmanov, head of Russia's United Shipbuilding Corporation, told the TASS news agency that the ship's hull and deck had
been damaged, although what he called the vessel's vitally important parts had not been harmed.Yevgeny Gladyshev, a spokesman for the
shipbuilding factory which operated the floating dock, told the RIA news agency that unspecified equipment had been damaged but that much of
the deck had been spared because it had been removed during repairs.The floating dock had been hit by a power outage which had caused its
water tanks to fill up rapidly, prompting it to sink, the factory said.The Admiral Kuznetsov gained notoriety in Britain when then Secretary
of Defence Michael Fallon dubbed it the "ship of shame" in 2017 when it passed through waters close to the English coast on its way back
from the Mediterranean belching black smoke.(This story has not been edited by TheIndianSubcontinent staff and is auto-generated from a
