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.
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.
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.
Why does Russia still use 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.