Russian captain tried to save son on sunken Kursk

"Why? Because my honour as an officer and my memory of my son compel me to tell the truth," said Geletin, his voice trembling.

He spent the last 10 days on board one of the navy’s rescue vessels in the Barents Sea, coordinating the "colossal work" to try to save his son, a lieutenant, and his comrades trapped on the sea bed, 108 metres below the surface.

"We did everything we could, everything we could. Yes, the fleet does need good emergency rescue units and we didn’t have them," he said.

He lashed out at critical media coverage of the navy’s rescue effort. The navy has come under fire for making contradictory and unreliable statements about the crisis.

"The fleet command always told the truth…(at the beginning) nobody could say exactly what had happened to the vessel," he said, explaining why initial navy reports played down the seriousness of the Kursk‘s situation.

"Nobody could have said — right, the vessel is on the seabed, that means everybody is dead," he said.

Geletin said that from the very moment the Kursk went out of radio contact during exercises, he knew it was his son’s crew on board submarine K-141, rather than the second crew which all Russian subs have.

He said he never gave up hope for Boris, even though he served at the front of the vessel which was probably flooded almost instantly.

"Only after the official announcement did I say: my son has perished, along with his friends and comrades. I don’t know if you could find a man who could have said so earlier," he said, drawing deeply on a cigarette and looking at the floor.

Russian officials now think the submarine’s crew died almost instantly when an explosion ripped through it.

Early last week they said they had heard tapping on the hull, indicating that crew members were still alive.

"You can be mistaken about these sounds, about what caused them. Whether they were human or mechanical noises. We really wanted it to be so — that they were still alive," he said.

He said it was obvious that the blame for the accident lay in the fact that Russia’s superpower-sized military is trying to subsist on a Third World-sized budget.

"You all know the reason very well: the fleet has many problems, like the whole military, like the whole country," he said.

President Vladimir Putin briefly visited this part of Russia’s Arctic North to talk to several hundred grieving relatives on Tuesday. Geletin said he would have put one simple question to Putin.

"I would have asked one question — one. Are we waiting in vain for funding for the armed services?"