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Time ticks away as uS, uK join hands to rescue Russian sub

Afp, Vladivostok
British and US teams joined the Russian navy yesterday in a desperate race to save the seven crew members of a Russian minisubmarine trapped with dwindling oxygen supplies on the Pacific Ocean floor.
One British and three US military transport planes flew into the far eastern regional capital Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky with Scorpio and Super Scorpio unmanned submersibles, capable of operating at great depths and armed with cable-cutters.
However, the Russian navy said it would be about 1600 GMT before the robots set off for the crippled Priz AS-28 mini-submarine, stranded for a third day 190 metres (625 feet) below the surface about 70km out into the Pacific.
Time ticks
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As the clock wound down on the submariners' air reserves, Russian rescuers attached cables in hopes of yanking the AS-28 from the tangle of underwater coastal surveillance gear in which it became trapped on Thursday during a military exercise.
The seven stranded men took emergency precautions to conserve air and families on shore kept an agonising vigil. "Papa's on the boat. He's coming back soon," the wife of submarine Captain Vyacheslav Milashevsky reassured her children in footage on state-run Channel One television.
Officials contradicted one another on how long the crew could be expected to survive.
"Oxygen on board should last to the end of these 24 hours and perhaps the next," Vice Admiral Vladimir Pelelyaev was quoted as saying by ITAR-TASS news agency at an unspecified hour Saturday. But other officials spoke of oxygen supplies being due to run out much earlier.
The crew, described by naval spokesmen as highly experienced, were waiting in temperatures of about five degrees Celsius (41 degrees Fahrenheit) and mostly in darkness in a bid to save energy.
To preserve every bit of oxygen, they were wearing special thermal suits and making a minimum of movement, officials said.
"We are sure that we will make a successful operation before the crew begin to experience the first signs of oxygen starvation," naval spokesman Igor Dygalo said.
There were also conflicting reports about the reason for the accident. Officials initially said the vessel had got caught in an abandoned fishing net, before saying the AS-28 was in fact snared in the coastal surveillance antenna, itself secured by a 60-tonne
anchor.
The confusion recalled the chaotic reaction to the sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk in the Barents Sea almost exactly five years ago in which all 118 crew died.
President Vladimir Putin met with intelligence and security service chiefs and ordered Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov to fly to the Kamchatka Peninsula region to oversee the operation, ITAR-TASS said.
However, Putin, who was criticised for failing to take command over the Kursk disaster, had yet to make any public statement.
The accident was the latest in a long series of crises to hit Russia's decrepit post-Soviet military, all the more embarrassing because of major sea-air exercises planned with China later this month.
However, in marked contrast to the Kursk disaster, Moscow immediately called on foreign expertise to help the rescue operation based in the militarily sensitive Kamchatka Peninsula. Japanese rescue ships were due to arrive on scene early next week. Earlier Saturday, Russian rescuers managed to attach a cable and attempted to tow the hull toward shore. Dygalo said the Taiger rescue ship dragged the crippled submarine about 60 metres (196 feet), but did not manage to free the AS-28.
In a further sign of confusion hampering Russian efforts, Admiral Viktor Fyodorov, the commander of the Pacific fleet, had earlier said that the AS-28 was moved one kilometre (0.6 mile).
The Priz submarine is 13.5 metres (44 feet) long and was first put into service in the late 1980s. The model trapped on the seabed was in need of repair, news agencies reported.