On deck it still looks like a Soviet naval vessel-red stars bedecking the cannon and a hammer and sickle emblem affixed to the stern.
But down below things have changed.
”When we had the union everything was clear,” said Lt. Cmdr. Viktor Galeta sitting in the officers` lounge of this anti-submarine frigate in the Black Sea Fleet. ”But now it is all a blur.”
Where once it sailed the Black Sea and the Mediterranean as part of a mighty navy belonging to a vast superpower, it now is politically,
psychologically and emotionally adrift-97,000 sailors and officers caught up in the struggle between Ukraine and Russia for dominance in the new Commonwealth of Independent States.
”I am in an ambiguous situation,” said Lt. Cmdr. Alexei Merzlakov, the Red Crimea`s chief navigator and a veteran of 13 years in the navy. ”I swore an oath to serve the whole nation and now they are trying to make me choose whom to serve. Who is to say that if I take this second oath they won`t make me swear a third, or fourth?”
Sipping tea as an American movie flickered on the television in the corner of the ward room, Merzlakov and his fellow officers rued the passing of the old order, a Soviet Union that held the military high in esteem and budgetary preference.
They also speculated about a bleak future.
They have witnessed an attempt by the Ukrainian government to have their commanding officer replaced because he is a Russian.
They have started getting much of their pay in coupons rather than in rubles as the Ukrainian economy slid deeper into disarray.
They have even heard suggestions that most of their aging, but honored fleet of 69 ships and 29 submarines, a fleet Catherine the Great established in 1783 on the southern edge of her empire, a fleet once commanded in part by John Paul Jones, be chopped up and sold as scrap metal.
All this has left the men of the frigate Red Crimea-like many of their colleagues throughout the armed forces of the former Soviet Union-deeply bitter.
Below deck, the sailor cynically refer to Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk as ”Chip” and ”Dale,” the two battling chipmunks of cartoon fame.
Adm. Igor Kasatonov, the fleet commander, stayed away from the cartoon metaphor, but left no doubt about what he thought of Kravchuk`s unsuccessful attempt to replace him with a Ukrainian officer.
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”That was pure political gambling,” Kasatonov he said in an interview.
Final agreement on the fleet`s fate won`t come until a March 20 meeting of the commonwealth leaders, but Ukrainian officials have said a plan has been drawn up to divide the fleet between Russia and Ukraine.
Meanwhile, in an attempt to lure officers to their side, Ukrainian officials-including Defense Minister Konstentin Morozov-have promised better pay and better allowances to those who swear allegiance to the armed forces of 200,000 to 400,000 men that Ukraine is trying to build.
For highly trained specialists who now find their meager salaries eclipsed by wages of the average taxi driver, for men who often have to live in shabby apartments, or cheap hotels with their families because of the lack of military housing, the offer may be one they can`t refuse.
”Those officers who are faced with problems of kids and the lack of an apartment will respond to the highest bidder,” said one middle-ranking officer who asked not to be named.
But the decision also involves national issues, as some officers from Russia and other republics hesitate to swear allegiance to the now-independent nation of Ukraine.
”I am a Russian, all my family is Russian, the whole family lives in Russia. I don`t see why I should swear an oath to Ukraine,” said navigator Merzlakov.
”It would be as if people in the U.S. Navy had to swear an oath to the states where they were born.”