Pretty much had to be that, or a torpedo, or both. The Moskva and the Russian military command knew that Ukraine had no active anti-ship missile capability that could take out the Moskva, so were not expecting the US to intervene directly. Still, something happened where the Moskva's impressive anti-missile defenses did not work, or did not work well enough.
There was the following shared on one of the Russian Telegram channels on 18th of April (translated with Deepl with slight edit for easy reading). Although in the text they do mention Ukrainians launching two "Neptun" missiles, so it doesn't fit with what the C's said. But perhaps it can still clarify some points and explain how US/CIA possibly did it. Maybe sailors assumed that these were Ukrainians, but it was actually US/CIA who launched the missiles. Because according to this explanation, they still did pretty much most of the work.
FROM SAILORS THROUGH PRIVATE CHANNELS. LOOKS LIKE SOMETHING CLOSE TO THE TRUTH: "The cruiser "Moskva" was in the area of Odessa, closer to Romania. A year ago it was equipped with a new locator with phased array, illumination range - 500 km! What was it there for?
Here's the reason: Ukrainian planes flew to the airfield in Romania, and from there they took off in the direction of the sea, made a detour and came in from Odessa, then flew to Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia, and struck the RF troops! All the airfields near Nikolaev and Odessa were already destroyed, and our forces could not understand where they were flying from. That's why they sent in the "Moskva" with a powerful locator!
It started illuminating and detecting those planes. Then from the airfields of Crimea and from near Donetsk our Su-35s started to intercept the Ukies. So nine of their MiGs and Sukhoys were shot down!
NATO figured it out! And here is the result! First they hit the cruiser with drones, broke locators and antennas! The cruiser shot down one drone, but at the same time it was already blinded in half! Then from the shore the Ukies launched two cruise missiles "Neptun".
Guidance was executed by NATO "Orion", which was hovering over Romania, it also switched on the radio-emission control and lit the detection station of the air defense of the cruiser! The missiles were heading towards the ship, with their homing heads off, so that the ship could not detect the irradiation points of these missiles. Meanwhile, they were guided by the NATO Orion - transmitting the exact coordinates of the ship! The result: two hits, explosion of ammunition, and the cruiser began to sink!" (Vocabulary and spelling of the source is mostly preserved.)
And thank you very much for the session!
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