>EDIT: It is quite possible that Ukrainians knew some kind of weakness to the ship that they exploited during the attack. not really. If they could they would

>EDIT: It is quite possible that Ukrainians knew some kind of weakness to the ship that they exploited during the attack. not really. If they could they would hit the cruiser's anti-ship missiles - that would sent the ship immediately down instead of the whole fire/towing story. You just can't always hit that precisely from like 30 miles distance coming at transonic speed, and who knows what defense measures were activated by the ship. If anything, the weakness exploited here is the Russian poor state of combat readiness. The ship was mostly hanging around there for more than a month. All that time they were supposed to man the radars and keep CIWS/etc. combat ready - no way for Russian Navy. Maintaining combat readiness is a big issue even for shorter time frames - for example in 2008 while guarding the assault ships convoy on the way to Georgia "Moskva" was hit by the very brave and brazen unexpected night attack by Georgian small ships. Fortunately for "Moskva" back then the Georgians didn't have any weapons except small caliber artillery (it is really hard to imagine the courage of those Georgians to perform such an attack - just 4 small ships against that overwhelmingly large Russian Navy force. One of those Georgian ships was sunk by Russian anti-ship missile).