GOGLAND ISLAND /Leningrad Region/, July 27. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin has told reporters his impressions about the dive to the bottom of the Gulf of Finland, he made earlier on Saturday.
"The impressions are vivid, I would say," he told reporters when he went out of the bathyscaphe.
"It’s not the first time that I dived under the water. Therefore, I have impressions not from the dive itself but rather, from what we saw there (the remains of the U-308 submarine - TASS)."
Putin said he did not run the bathyscaphe during the dive. He said that first, during the descent of the vehicle to the bottom a cloud of silt rose but later it dispersed and it became possible to inspect the remains of the submarine from all sides.
Putin made a dive to the bottom of the Gulf of Finland in the bathyscaphe to inspect the remains of the Shch-308 Semga submarine that sank during the Great Patriotic War. The 50-meter dive onboard the Sea Explorer-3 lasted about an hour.
During the submergence, one of the divers mounted a memorable plaque on the site of the submarine’s wreck in Putin’s presence. After that the lights went off and the ceremony participants observed a minute of silence in tribute to the memory of the killed submariners.