This is the full text of strana.ru’s exclusive interview with Prosecutor-General Vladimir Ustinov as his investigators begin their inquiries into the sinking of Kursk.

        By Ivan Yesyutin

        QUESTION: Will the lifting of Kursk really help in finding out the truth about its sinking?

        ANSWER: Of course it will. But one should not get the idea that the submarine’s lifting and transportation were an end in itself for the prosecutor’s office. The lifting operation is a moral and political action. The Russian state performed its duty to its citizens, its duty to the Russian - and ultimately (taking into consideration the nuclear submarine’s potential danger) - the world community. High-flown words are possibly out of place here, but, for all the tragic quality of the situation, the extremely difficult operation that took place was, in effect, an epic of life. I think it worked a change for the better in each of us. As far as the investigation is concerned, there has been action to clear up causes, conditions and circumstances of what happened since the loss of the submarine. Without exaggeration, a huge amount of work directed at an objective and comprehensive investigation of the case has been done for slightly over a year. It is another matter that the materials we have collected so far cannot provide a complete and totally clear picture of the event. But step by step, we are coming closer to understanding what caused the tragedy.

        QUESTION: What kind of rapport is there between your prosecutorial inquiry and the work done by Ilya Klebanov’s governmental commission of investigation?

        ANSWER: Legal investigation is the highest form of inquiry into some circumstance. Experts, specialists, commissions may express different points of view, put forward any kind of lead, and all have the right to inform the public about them. Their conclusions are based on knowledge, experience and intuition. The findings of a legal inquiry are about correlating facts, proofs and expert advice with the law. You have a different degree of responsibility here, each member of an investigative field team is responsible for his conclusions primarily before the law.

        QUESTION: What were the principles for forming the investigative team?

        ANSWER: Of course, we in the prosecutor-general’s office have been preparing for the moment when we will be able to pursue investigative action directly on the facility that suffered distress. After all, as my colleagues say, it is an inspection on the spot. The material evidence and information obtained here will later become, as we hope, the elements of an integral picture. We were manning an investigative team for a whole year. We selected, trained and tested personnel. Not everyone stood the test. You know, we investigators are, generally speaking, hard people used to various aspects of life, including death, corpses, and the like.

        But the August tragedy of the submarine is a different case. It was mostly psychologically-firm people who passed muster – top experts, still young, but highly professional. Majors, lieutenant-colonels, and captains of justice. There are lieutenants. Mostly from the military prosecutor’s offices of Moscow and Leningrad military districts, the Northern Fleet, and the staff of the chief military prosecutor’s office. Nine of them were participants in combat operations in Chechnya. Heading the teams is First Deputy-Chief Military Prosecutor Yury Yakovlev, a top-notch military lawyer. The investigators planned their work in advance too: What they should see, where and what tell-tale signs to look for. The main aim of the investigative teams, eight of them in all, is to take steps for making examinations, I mean, to get materials, instrument readings indicating what, where, and in which position things were at the moment the tragedy struck. On their basis, we will model the situation inside the submarine at the moment of the disaster.

        Here, everything is of importance. For instance, one instrument from the second compartment was found by divers as far afield as the fourth. We must find out for certain under which circumstances it could get there. All in all, we plan more than 20 examinations, including work with the bodies of the deceased. We want to ascertain the direct causes of death and identify the bodies. These will be followed by new examinations. But don’t think things will clear up the moment the investigators step into the submarine. We expect it to be a protracted process. We will work on three leads simultaneously: they are well known. I think we certainly will not get the full picture unless we examine the submarine’s bow section. But some 70-80 per cent of the circumstances of the tragedy, I believe, we will manage to clear up with the help of comprehensive examination and investigation of the submarine.

        QUESTION: For how long will your specialists keep Kursk in the dock?

        ANSWER: The prosecutor’s office does not and cannot aspire to an absolute monopoly on work aboard the ship. Naval specialists will work in parallel with us. We understand it is necessary to dismantle the missiles and other weapons, control the reactor zone, to have the ship salvaged stage by stage. Our goal, I repeat, is to register all that was, and in what position it was, at the moment of the disaster.

        QUESTION: Many readers of our site ask whether or not there will be an examination of other ships which were in the area of the August 2000 exercises.

        ANSWER: We have examined them. There are examination data: no traces of a collision have been found on them. I will say more: a military staff examination is also in progress. It implies analysing actions by the naval officials who organised and held the exercises in question. We are analysing the navy’s orders and regulations, operational documents and actions by each official. I mean, our investigative actions are not limited to the investigations inside the submarine itself, but at this particular stage it is the work here, on Kursk, that is of greatest importance.

        QUESTION: Investigative work, as a rule, is very much behind closed doors and secret. At your latest meetings with journalists, however, you say that the work on Kursk will be maximally transparent and public. What is this – distain for standards, an exception to the rules?

        ANSWER: This is a wrong occasion for hiding anything. All of us experienced real shock seeing our heroic sailors die. We suffered this national tragedy together. Together, too, we will advance towards the truth, to comprehension of what happened. Step by step. Yes, we will be maximally open, but certainly not to the detriment of the interests of our country and the state.

        ends