Russia’s “shadow fleet” of aging oil tankers helps fund the ongoing war but puts the region at risk of more environmental disasters.
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.”
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.”
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