Like I been saying, Nato is definitely helping Ukraine a lot with intelligence and secret maneuvers to test their technology against Russia's.

This is the 2nd ship sunk right?

Aircraft carriers are more for patrolling oceans, far from your shoreline to project your airforce to support other ships, ground forces etc. As you say, the Russia has territory in the Black Sea basin making an aircraft carrier unnecessary, they can just use a land airstrip. Plus the relatively small size of the Black Sea means an aircraft carrier would be overkill - they would more likely have one in their Far East fleet which would be on a larger body of water and with less built up areas where airstrip can perform the same function.

Edit - Turns out not even their Far East (actually called Pacific) Fleet has one. Russia only has 1 aircraft carrier and its assigned to their Northern Fleet which patrols their artic waters. And no, they can’t redeploy it or other ships to the Black Sea because Turkey closed the straits into it at the start of the war to all ships that aren’t based in the Black Sea. Sure, Russia could attack to force the straights open again, but Turkey is a Nato member...

“Russians complain that Ukr forces used an airplane NE of Nikolayev to be used as a decoy, distracting AA systems and allowing Neptune rockets to hit Moskva.”

Oh, waah. My heart bleeds for them.

So either Ukraine pulled off a major strike on a high value target or Russia’s navy is that incompetent.

Whilst in context, I think it’s more likely the ship was hit by Ukrainian missles, I’ve just remembered something that makes the ammo explosion excuse more believable - the sinking of the Kursk submarine.

For those who don’t know, the Kursk was a nuclear powered submarine and a jewel of the Russian Navy. Considered unsinkable, in 2000 it was participating in war games, firing a dummy torpedo where a combination of factor resulted in an explosion in the ammo storage leading to the sinking of the vessel. The other Russian forces didn’t realise and thus didn’t act on it for several hours.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kursk_submarine_disaster

Battleships pretty much died with World War II. They were an expensive waste of money that failed to fulfill the purposes of naval warfare or power projection. Smaller, more maneuverable ships outclassed them on the former, and carriers do a far more effective job with the latter. Carriers are also extremely expensive to build. Neither Russia nor China comes anywhere close to the carrier tonnage of the United States Navy, which is why we can project power in the Indo-Pacific region. 

The only organization that really handles battleships in this day and age is Hasbro. 

The main reason is because both rockets (on cruisers and destroyers) and airplanes (on carriers) outrange cannons and are more precise with modern guidance systems.

Still, the US kept their WW2 Iowa-class Battleships around, and the USSR was scared shitless of them. They were armored so much that most anti-ship rockets of the time could only ding them unless it was a very lucky hit, while being hit by one of their shells would have been catastrophic for any other warship of the cold war.

One other reason is that ships are much bigger in general these days. A modern destroyer is larger than a WW2 cruiser despite being a class below. Hence why cruisers became the flagships: due to the square cubed law, making ships even bigger started to become impractically large and heavy, and the shipyards would be too small for that.

This is good to know, thanks for sharing! Amusingly, towards the end of reading that, my mind drifted towards he massive ship at the beginning of Space Balls, as well as the quote about breaking for no one.