Bristling with gun turrets, radars and aerials, she looked like a giant porcupine stranded in the Sevastopol harbour.

With her massive grey bulk reflected in the oily waters of the port, the battleship looked twice her size – enormous and ominously threatening. ‘Slava’ (Glory) was written along the starboard, close to the bow.

It was 1987. I was on a Black Sea cruise on-board MS Tajikistan as an ‘entertainer’, i.e. enjoying a free cabin in exchange for some stand-up comedy (reading my own stories and poems). Sailing past Slava (later renamed Moskva), a 200m-long flagship of the Soviet (and later Russian) Navy, was one of the cruise’s undisputed highlights.

Not in their wildest dreams could the passengers on board Tajikistan (including yours truly) have imagined that, 35 years on, Moskva – the seemingly impregnable and unsinkable Soviet military vessel they had spotted accidentally in the Ukrainian city port of Sevastopol, later illegally annexed by Russia...