The 9,500-dwt (deadweight tonnage) vessel built in 2009 was sailing between St. Petersburg and Vladivostok when the incident occurred in international waters near the Spanish ports of Aguilas and Oran.
According to The Maritime Executive, an explosion in the engine room caused the ship to roll.
The vessel had a total of 16 crew members, 14 of whom were rescued by the Maritime Rescue Service and brought to the port of Cartagena late on Dec. 23. Two crew members are still missing.
The Ursa Major was operated by a subsidiary of the sanctioned Russian defense company Oboronlogistika, which stated that the vessel was "carrying a large project cargo as part of state tasks for the development of port infrastructure and the Northern Sea Route."
The cargo included two Liebherr mobile cranes for the port of Vladivostok, which is severely overloaded due to a lack of cranes, and two 45-ton hatches for the construction of a new nuclear icebreaker, Project 10510, Oliver Alexander, an OSINT analyst, wrote on X.
Their loss is expected to significantly affect loading/unloading time in Vladivostok and cause major delays in the icebreaker's construction.
Earlier, on Dec. 15, two Russian tankers, Volgoneft-212 and Volgoneft-239, each capable of carrying up to 5,000 tons of oil products, sank in the Kerch Strait, causing an environmental disaster in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov
On the same day, a Russian floating crane ship, designed to lift heavy loads, was reported to be in distress off the coast of the temporarily occupied Yalta.