Two Russian tankers ran aground on Sunday December 15 during a storm near annexed Crimea.
Two Russian tankers ran aground on Sunday December 15 during a storm near annexed Crimea, causing the death of a sailor and a fuel leak into the sea, authorities announced.
“Due to a storm in the Black Sea, two tankers, the Volgoneft-212 and the Volgoneft-239, suffered an accident,” declared the Russian Federal Agency for River and Maritime Transport (Rosmorretchflot).
On Telegram, she adds that this double grounding led to “a spill of petroleum products” and that two tugboats and two helicopters were sent as part of a rescue operation.
The two tankers are in the Kerch Strait, which connects Russia to Ukrainian Crimea annexed by Moscow. On Telegram, the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry stressed that one member of the Volgoneft-212 crew had died and that 12 others had been evacuated.
“Violation of security rules”
According to this source, this ship was “damaged and ran aground”, while the other, with a crew of 14 people, was “drifting” before also running aground at “80 meters from the shore near the port of Taman” in the Russian region of Krasnodar.
Videos broadcast by Russian media show one end of Volgoneft-212 partially submerged and floating vertically. Eleven evacuated sailors suffering from hypothermia were hospitalized in the city of Anapa, the governor of the Krasnodar region, Veniamine Kondratiev, said on Telegram.
The evacuation of the 14 sailors still on board the second ship was suspended due to bad weather, the emergency services announced in the evening. According to a source with the authorities, cited by the TASS press agency, the two ships were transporting a total of nearly 9,000 tonnes of fuel oil.
President Vladimir Putin has ordered the creation of a working group to “eliminate” this pollution at sea, the Kremlin announced. The causes of this double grounding have not yet been clarified, but two investigations have been opened for “violation of safety rules”.
Two hypotheses considered
According to a sea rescue source, interviewed by the Interfax press agency, two hypotheses are possible: an error by the crew in the middle of a storm or an overload caused by the waves on these boats dating from the 1980s and designed for river or sea navigation in calm weather.
In the Kerch Strait, a rail and road bridge connects the Crimean peninsula to Russia, but it has been attacked several times by kyiv forces, in the midst of armed conflict between Ukraine and Russia.
These attacks forced Moscow to find other means of supplying this peninsula, notably by sea. At the end of August, a ferry carrying fuel sank in this same strait after being the target of a Ukrainian attack.
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