Otvazhny had ranged far beyond the Black Sea in her nine years of service. Laid down in 1963 at the 61 Kommunara shipyard in what is now the Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv, launched in 1964, and commissioned into the Soviet Navy at the end of 1965, she was a Kashin-class destroyer built for a navy asserting itself across the world's oceans. During the Six-Day War in 1967 she carried out combat duties off Port Said, and she returned to the Egyptian coast during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, escorting Soviet landing ships. That same autumn she paid a friendlier call at the Italian ports of Taranto and Messina, then spent months deployed in the Mediterranean before coming home to the exercises that would be her last.

The missile that ignited touched off the warheads of others stored with it, and the blast tore the hull enough to let water in. Otvazhny took a twelve-degree list to starboard, and every effort to flood her magazines and drown the fire failed. Ships raced out from Sevastopol: the destroyer Soznatelny reached her first and took her under tow, joined by Bedovy, Komsomolets Ukrainy, and the rescue ship Beshtau, which fought the flames and lifted off the injured. The towing itself went wrong, a line parting or an order confused, so that she was taken in tow, cast loose, and taken up again. All the while the water pumped aboard to fight the fire pooled in her empty compartments, and her list slowly, relentlessly worsened.

At 14:47 a second ammunition explosion ripped through her stern, and her list lurched to twenty-seven degrees. She lost all power. The order to abandon ship came at 15:10, and the crew went into the water and onto the rescue vessels as she began to settle by the stern. At 15:57, more than six hours after the first spark, Otvazhny sank. Of the 287 people aboard, including a rear admiral and staff officers who had come along for the exercises, 24 were killed. There was no enemy in this story, no shot fired in anger, only a peacetime drill turned catastrophe and a long afternoon of men trying, and failing, to hold on to their ship.