Two Russian oil tankers ran aground Sunday during a storm near annexed Crimea. The accident caused the death of a sailor and a fuel leak into the sea, authorities said.
Crimea: two Russian tankers in danger during a storm, at least one dead
The Russian tanker Volgoneft 212 broken in two and its front part sinking in the Kerch Strait.
15.12.2024
“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.
According to this source, this ship was “damaged and ran aground”, while the other, whose crew was made up 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.
Two hypotheses
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 transported 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 cause of this double grounding has not yet been clarified but two investigations have been opened for “violation of safety rules”.
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 overloading caused by the waves on these boats dating from the 1980s and designed for river or sea navigation in calm weather.
Resupply by sea
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 an 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.
