On Dec. 15, 2024, in a raging storm, two Russian oil tankers carrying more than 9,000 tons of heavy oil collided off the coast of Port Taman in the Kerch Strait in the Black Sea. A video posted to Telegram allegedly depicting the crash shows one of the tankers, with a broken bow, sinking into the sea. The second vessel reportedly ran aground closer to the port.
The crash spilled thousands of tons of toxic heavy fuel oil and has harmed thousands of birds, dozens of dolphins, and other animals, and resulted in a state of emergency in Crimea. By mid-January the fuel had spread far enough that it could be seen from space. Satellite images studied by Greenpeace show coastal contamination stretching from Novorossiysk in the Krasnodar Krai to Ozero Donuzlav in the western coast of Russian-occupied Crimea. Even Russian president Vladimir Putin called the disaster “one of the most serious environmental challenges we have faced in recent years.”
For a region accustomed to rough seas and choppy weather, this accident, while unfortunate, was not uncommon. Experts have raised alarms about Russian tankers in the region for years, following previous accidents that caused smaller but still significant spills.
With this new crash continuing to cause damage, experts and activists warn that the region remains heavily militarized and under the control of the corrupt, autocratic Russian government, making response to the oil spill increasingly challenging.
This has left a vacuum in disaster response, filled sparingly by local volunteers who’ve worked for three months to mitigate the damage.
Anna, a student from Moscow, was among the first few volunteers on the scene.
“I study at a university that specializes in the oil and gas industry, so I was able to find out quickly how much fuel oil was on the surface and what the government was doing to deal with the emergency,” she told The Revelator. (Anna did not disclose her full name for fear of retribution.)
Along with a dozen others, Anna made her way to the Anapa, a coastal resort town in Krasnodar Krai, and began coordinating with groups organizing rescue and cleanup efforts. Within days hundreds of volunteers had mobilized to help, including other students, many of whom traveled from as far as Moscow to help with the cleaning.
The reaction from the Russian government has been a lot less enthusiastic. It took the government nearly two weeks to declare the state of emergency Dec. 25.
Volunteers, however, have been working relentlessly.
“We are catching, cleaning, and helping birds” affected by the spill, Anna said. “This is the easiest part of our work.” Volunteers also engaged in beach-cleaning efforts, but full treatment of the pollution will require specialized workers.
A Heavy Problem
The problems facing volunteers are not just logistical. The nature of the fuel they’re attempting to clear is itself problematic.
“Fuel oil is quite heavy, so it sinks,” Anna explained. “But if the temperature rises or there are storms, it rises in the water and hits the shorelines again.”
The vessels carried mazut, a type of low-quality heavy fuel oil that can be very difficult to clean in a spill.
“Heavy fuel oil, also known as residual fuel, is what’s left at the end of the refining process,” explained Sian Prior, a marine science expert and lead adviser to the Clean Arctic Alliance, an organization that has advocated for tighter rules on fossil-fuel shipments in the region. “It’s used by a lot of ships in many different parts of the world. Most of the heavy fuels also have very high sulfur levels, which when burned releases sulfur oxides, which is bad for health and the environment.”
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In 2020 the International Maritime Organization, which regulates global commercial shipping, introduced a limit on the amount of sulfur allowed in the fuel.
But the fuel industry responded by blending fuels, mixing lighter fuels with heavy fuel to create a product that has low sulfur but still has a lot of heavy residual fuel, Prior said.
The resulting mix poses several challenges after spills. “It’s very difficult to clean up, because it’s very viscous and emulsifies when it mixes with water, so its volumes actually increase,” she said. “Once this fuel is spilled … it’s virtually impossible to clean it up adequately.”
The effects of a mazut spill could be worse than regular oil spills, which in themselves are disastrous.
“The lighter fuels, distillate fuels, will break up much more quickly in the environment,” Prior explains.
Mazut, however, remains very thick and viscous.
“It can even end up forming hard balls of oil that will sink to the seabed, and get mixed into the sediment, sand, and can persist there for a very, very long time,” she said. “If there’s a storm it can get then released back into the environment, or if it gets very warm, it will become a little bit more viscous,” she said, echoing the experiences of volunteers in Anapa.
“It clogs everything it mixes with…and can have a smothering effect on wildlife, marine mammals or birds if they come into contact with it. It’s also toxic, so if they ingest it, it will have an effect internally on their organs.”
While Prior’s organization mainly focuses on advocacy in the Arctic Sea region, it says the events in Kerch are a warning on the dangers of transporting heavy fuel. As a result of the work by Clean Arctic Alliance, the International Maritime Organization instituted its ban on the use and carriage of heavy fuel oil in the Arctic as of July 2024. “But not all countries have implemented it so far. Russia hasn’t yet.”
Shady Oils, Shadow Vessels
Russia’s transport of this already dangerous substance has become more precarious because it’s currently being navigated across continents on fleets of extremely old, poorly maintained and uninsured ships.
In fact, while the total number of oil spills worldwide has declined over the past four decades, the statistics are the opposite in the Russian seas, said Dmitry Lisitsyn, a Russian environmentalist and executive fellow at the Yale School of Environment.
Lisitsyn’s organization, Sakhalin Environment Watch, monitors environmental safety and wildlife preservation on the eastern coast of Russia. The Russian government has declared it a “foreign agent,” limiting their work there.
Before that they worked on cleaning up after a similar, albeit less pervasive oil spill in the southwest coast of Sakhalin Island in 2015.
Lisitsyn said that despite growing number of oil-spill incidents in Russia, the government has lacked the political will to enforce preventive measures or actionable laws. Following December’s crash a local court in Krasnodar Krai filed the company that owned the tankers just 30,000 rubles (about $215) last month.
But more worryingly, Lisitsyn said, the stakeholders seem reluctant to learn lessons from previous spills — including one in the Kerch Strait in 2007.
“A similar spill, in the same region, involving the same type of tankers in the same kind of weather conditions should have been lesson enough,” he said.
“It was about 20 kilometers to the north [of the current site], near the island of Tuzla, and took place around the same time of the year, but was half the amount of mazut spilled,” said Russian environmental scientist Eugene Simonov. “It caused a lot of damage, even though the scale and geographic range was smaller.”
But 2007 was not even the first time, Simonov pointed out.
In 1999 a tanker, the same kind that crashed in December, crashed “in front of the Istanbul ports. The tanker split in half and heavy fuel poured out in front of some popular tourist spots,” he said. “It was the least problematic because Turkey was really good at handling that and did not even engage with Russia or anyone else. They just went ahead and cleaned it up.”
The biggest takeaway from these incidents, Simonov said, is that these tankers need to be decommissioned.
“They are beyond their useful working age and not well-equipped to go into the sea, even into the Black Sea,” he said. “They’re built for the river and even the smallest waves put them in a clear danger of splitting, because they are too long and too weak.”
Lisitsyn agrees. “These series of tankers should not go to the sea,” he said. “They are completely unsafe in the stormy seas.”
Both tankers were built during the Soviet times. The Volgoneft-212 was about 55 years old, while Volgoneft-239 was a little over 40 years old.
Why does Russia still use these old, unreliable vessels? The answer lies in its ongoing invasion of Ukraine and the many sanctions on Russian goods, particularly oil exports.
Soon after the 2022 invasion, several western countries banned or significantly reduced the import of Russian oil, sanctions implemented largely on pipeline purchases. To bypass the sanctions, Russia has employed fleets of tankers, usually very old and in poor condition with obscure details of ownership, to continue its trade with western companies.
The lack of identity of these tankers, widely referred to as “Shadow Fleets,” helps Russia circumvent sanctions to continue selling its prime economic product. One report by the Carnegie Eurasia center documented 2,849 oil tankers in the first nine months of 2024. The vessels carried an estimated average of 48 million barrels of oil per day.
In 2024 Greenpeace identified a list of 192 aging tankers carrying Russian oil around the world.
“The list covers only crude oil tankers, which are currently not on any sanctions list but are outdated old vessels,” said Natalia Gozak, director at Greenpeace Ukraine. “The ships visited Russian ports at least three times during the observation period, which established their connection to the Russian oil trade, and it was noted that they didn’t have internationally recognized insurance which would cover costs of any potential oil spill.”
Since Greenpeace released the list, Gozak said, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union have sanctioned about 70 of the vessels. Another 130 ships continue transporting oil for Russia.
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The shadow fleet has several major implications, said Gozak, “the first of which is that it is financing the war and invasion of Ukraine.”
Nearly 1,000 Russian tankers sailed along the Baltic coast in 2023, a Greenpeace report noted, averaging two to three ships per day, and the “highest number of Russian oil tankers ever recorded off the German coast.”
As Russia increasingly moves its oil trade through shadow fleets, Gozak estimates the revenues from these exports fund approximately one third of its military budget.
“It’s a huge source of income that continues fueling the war,” she said. “I’m based in Kyiv, and I can feel the impact here every day when we come under drone and missile attacks. It’s intensive.”
The other prominent effect of these fleets is on the environment.
“We have conducted a simulation of possible oil spill in the Baltic Sea and calculated the currents any spill in the region could spread really fast and the impact will be absolutely huge, affecting all countries bordering the Baltic Sea,” Gozak warned.
He also brought up the 2007 spill in Kerch to emphasize the dangers posed by the most recent tragedy.
“At the time about 1,300 tons of mazut was spilled,” much less than the current spill, he says. “But the impact was huge. Nearly 30,000 birds were killed.”
The contamination also “lasted for years,” he said. “This type of oil doesn’t remain on the surface. It sinks down, especially when it’s cold, affecting bottom marine life, including filtrating organisms like mussels, and in this way could enter the food chain. We will continue to see the impact in the coming years, much like in 2007, when even two years after, studies showed high levels of contamination in the water there.”
Russian War Preventing Response
The conflict in the region, beginning with the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and continuing through its invasion of Ukraine, has resulted in heavy militarization of the Black Sea region. This has further complicated redressal of the catastrophe.
The war decreases the ability to mobilize international support, said Simonov.
To make things worse, “the disputed status of occupied areas creates an incentive to hide the degree of disaster even more than in times of peace.”
During the 2007 spill, Simonov said, both Russia and Ukraine participated in a cleanup. The two countries “quarreled with each other but had some joint operation” and allowed for international intervention. “Now you have a militarized area where they don’t want any eyes. So even if they lack technical capacity, they’re unwilling to seek support.”
The war has already contributed to environmental pollution in the region, as Simonov wrote in a paper for the Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Working Group.
“Risks posed by wrecked ships have also increased, with roughly 100 additional ships, military and civilian, sinking or damaged since the war began,” he noted in the paper. “For example, evidence of a limited oil spill was visible from space at the site where the Moskva military cruiser sank. Most of its fuel reserves, which may exceed 2,000 tons, are probably still stored in its fuel tanks at a depth of 50 meters — a huge risk for the future.”
Russia may also not readily admit that it lacks the technical capacity to assess the damage or conduct adequate cleanup.
“There are two aspects: the political will and the technological capacity to respond. Russia lacks both,” Simonov said.
“Their systems are based on false reporting,” he continued. “Even when the initial figures demanded immediate action, they had no capacity to monitor or respond. It took them ten days to make key decisions.”
He pointed to recent documents he discovered from April 2024 that show the company that owned the two ships passed their environmental impact assessments positively.
Additionally, Simonov said, Russian officials had a full-scale oil-spill prevention and response drill in October 2024 that was supposedly concluded successfully.
“So essentially they faked the whole complex of environmental preparations, because only two months after an emergency drill, they were still unable to do anything,” he said.
“They purport themselves to be a great energy empire but lack the technological capacity to deal with a situation that has occurred before, and for which there should have been plans, drills and protocols in place.”
Prior said Russia is not alone in this problem.
“Obviously things are very difficult in terms of engaging with Russia at the moment, because environmental groups no longer have any status there,” she said. “But they’re not the only ones by any means. Countries that have large shipping fleets tend to be more challenging in terms of getting them to work to the same level.”
Assessing Future Risk
Parts of the sunken vessels, still holding nearly 4,000 tons of fuel, lie at the bottom of the strait. Environmentalists have raised concerns over the potential effects.
The timing of the accident made a difference, though.
“It happened during a season when there wasn’t any active breeding of the marine population, or migration,” Simonov said. The colder temperatures also helped prevent some of the active pollution, he pointed out.
But as the temperature rises and seasons change, the insufficient response from the government increases vulnerability.
“The greatest fear right now is that those tankers still down there with remaining mazut will start actively spilling around March-April…during the active bird and fish migration. That may make things clearly much worse,” he said.
With global waters already warmer than previous decades, the mazut at the bottom of the sea increases the risks of marine pollution.
Volunteers have been working relentlessly over the past two months but aren’t sure yet of the extend of the damage.
“I hope that we will be able to clean the beaches and catch the [affected] birds,” Anna said. “But it’s impossible to say how much has been cleaned and how much remains.”
Meanwhile the damage spreads.
“The emergency affected not only the city of Anapa, but also Sochi and Crimea,” Anna said. “There are also rehabilitation centers working in the area. Volunteers are helping to get rid of all this because they care.”
The tragedy continues to threaten the safety of marine life three months after the initial crash. According to the Delphi Scientific and Ecological Center for Dolphin Rescue, which is operating rescue efforts in the region, at least 84 dolphins have been killed by the oil spill as of February.
Anna urges the administration to take coastline health more seriously to mitigate further damage.
“We need to bring equipment that can remove one and a half meters of sand at a time,” she said. “We need a system to work with landfill [owners] to remove the contaminated soil.”
But most importantly, she said, “we need to improve our oil-spill response plan. We don’t know when or where it might happen again.”
That’s a warning echoed by many of the experts we spoke with: Under Russia’s corrupt, autocratic system and fossil-fuel-based economy, the chances of the country’s shadow fleet causing another environmental disaster — and the people and wildlife of the area suffering because of it — remains all too high.
Previously in The Revelator:
War Threatens Ukraine’s Unique Red Seaweed Fields. Here’s How Scientists Monitor Them From Afar
