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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
Russia still has not eliminated the consequences of the 2 Volgonaft tanker disaster in the Kerch Strait. Countries that detected pollution on their territory will remain without compensation; 120 thousand cetaceans died.
At the same time, the sinking of these tankers is only one crisis episode in the Black Sea region related to Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. This also includes environmental contamination after the destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant, spills of vegetable oils after strikes on ports, and the impact of military operations on marine fauna. This was reported by 24 Kanal with reference to material from The Insider.
Why did the disaster happen and who allowed it to happen?
In the case of a disaster in the Black Sea, Russia was supposed to comply with a range of international obligations it had assumed. In particular, the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL) provides for sanctions and investigations of accidents.
The classification documents for Volgonafta-212 allowed its operation in the Black Sea only until 31 October. The owner of Volgonafta-239 indicated a similar restriction until 20 November. Moreover, the RCO register listed the vessel’s status as “08 – Documents suspended.” That means the ship had no right to go to sea at all.
In practice, however, the tanker with invalid documents received 4300 tons of oil in the port of Azov and sailed out to sea. And Volgonafta-212 was able to remain at sea after its operational period had expired. Volgonafta-239 arrived at the port of Kavkaz as early as 6 November, but did not receive instructions from the charterer about where to discharge and remained at the Kavkaz anchorage until 30 November.
Instead of suspending operation of a vessel without documents, the RCO announced it was ready to consider the possibility of extending the ship’s sailing season in that area.
The second body that should have prevented tankers from being at sea during the storm was the Vessel Traffic Management Service (VTMS) of the Kerch Strait of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise Rosmorport. This agency organizes vessel movement and anchorage, requests information from them about restrictions on navigation areas, and relays the necessary information to the harbor master.
On 18 November 2024 the VTMS operator permitted Volgonafta-212 to anchor at anchorage No. 453 outside the port’s waters.
On 3 December the agency approved an anchorage in the Black Sea—outside the area permitted for that vessel. On 14 December VTMS instructed ships to proceed to the shelter “Zapovitne” off Cape Takil on the Crimean peninsula. During the transit VTMS reported that there were no berths available in the shelter and redirected Volgonafta-212 and Volgonafta-239 to another location off Cape Takil.
On the morning of 15 December the wind strengthened to 25 meters per second and wave height rose to four meters, and both tankers suffered accidents.
The daily schedule of vessel movements and placements in the port area is determined by the captain of the seaport Kavkaz. In December 2024 this post was held by Yevhen Skorchenko. In November Volgonafta-212 submitted an application to enter the port on 18 November. The document reminded about seasonal restrictions and the prohibition on being in the Black Sea after October. Despite the restrictions, an inspector of the State Port Control (SPC) accepted the application and later approved the daily schedule of movements.
Neither the RCO, nor the VTMS, nor the harbor master demanded that Volgonafta-212 and Volgonafta-239 be removed from prohibited areas, cancel the schedule, or forbid anchorage.
How did Russia try to eliminate the consequences and why did the whole Black Sea region suffer?
After the tankers’ disaster, Russian authorities tried to contain the consequences, but never fully eliminated the source of pollution. During the first week nothing was done to limit the spread of petroleum products.
Only on the 13 day after the disaster were the first 250 meters of oil boom containment installed around the stern section of Volgonafta-239, which grounded near Cape Panagia. Installation of booms, whose total length reached 2140 meters, was not completed until 13 January 2025.
By that time fuel oil slicks were recorded not only on the shores of the Kerch Peninsula, but in six municipalities of occupied Crimea—from Yalta to Feodosia. In Sevastopol at that time severe pollution caused a mass stranding of dead European anchovies.
Meanwhile, in the case of Volgonafta-212, booms began to be installed on 20 December 2024—that is, only after fuel oil leakage was detected. Authorities collected polluted sand on the beaches while fuel oil continued to leak from sunken fragments of the hulls.
The first attempts to address the source of contamination directly were made only a month after the accident. On 17 January 2025 the pumping of fuel oil from the stern section of Volgonafta-239, which had grounded, began. Those operations were completed in the spring of the same year.
On 21 August 2026 the Russian government commission reported that pumping fuel oil from the sunken sections of the tankers had been completed. But independent observers noted that this declared completion meant only that Russian authorities had stopped works, not that leaks had ceased.
Moreover, the monitoring channel Sky Eye published a series of satellite images taken from 4 to 21 September 2026. They show streak-like slicks stretching from cofferdams (empty compartments separating different parts of the ship) erected over the sunken bow and stern of the tankers Volgonafta-212 and Volgonafta-239.
Satellite images / monitoring channel Sky Eye
The accident area of both tankers lies within the main Black Sea current. This is a large cyclonic flow that moves counterclockwise along the sea’s perimeter: along Turkey it moves east toward Georgia, while from the Kerch Strait and Crimea it moves west and southwest toward the coasts of Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria and the Bosporus.
Therefore fuel oil from the sunken tanks did not remain near the Russian coast but spread across the entire basin. In June 2025 a team of scientists from Ukraine, Japan and Singapore published an OpenDrift model. According to the authors, fuel oil entered the main current and could reach the coasts of all Black Sea countries. At the time of publication the authors noted more than 80 cases of petroleum-product pollution recorded in the six months after the accident.
Meanwhile, The Insider analyzed satellite monitoring data and states that the area of petroleum-product slicks increased 10 times from January to May 2025. In Bulgaria’s exclusive economic zone, a single slick with an area of 1,59 km² was visible on images from 21 December 2024. By 20 January 2025 a new slick of 15,77 km² was detected. The pollution peak fell at the end of April–early May.
Fuel oil fractions could travel from the Kerch Strait toward Odesa and further to the coasts of Bulgaria and Turkey over two to three months. Heavy fuel oil cools and thickens, forms lumps, and can sink into the water column or to the bottom. On 4 March 2025 on the Romanian beach Eforie Nord, over 100 – 150 meters, black, sticky and viscous petroleum deposits were found along the high-tide line.
Which countries were afraid to level accusations?
Interestingly, neither the authorities of Bulgaria nor Romania publicly linked the fuel oil pollution to the accident in the Kerch Strait, avoiding accusations against Russia. On 31 March 2025 inspectors found one and a half tons of a sand-and-petroleum mixture on a Varna beach in Bulgaria. But after inspecting 12 vessels in Varna port, no culprit was identified. New pollution continued to be recorded for more than three weeks.
State officials of Black Sea countries named possible sources as discharges from ships. However, the beaches of Bulgaria and Romania were contaminated specifically by fuel oil from Volgonafta. This could only be established by chemical analysis of samples, which either were not conducted or whose results were not officially published. Romania and Bulgaria publicly limited themselves to stating that the pollution was of maritime origin, without conducting full monitoring.
The only Black Sea country that recorded pollution and appealed to international institutions was Ukraine.
What new threats did Russian military aggression provoke?
The impact of fuel oil spills, other pollution and hostilities on the environment can be seen in the deaths of cetaceans, which are at the top of the Black Sea food chain. Three endemic cetacean subspecies live there: the Black Sea harbor porpoise, the Black Sea common bottlenose dolphin, and the Black Sea common dolphin.
According to the IUCN Red List, the Black Sea harbor porpoise and the Black Sea bottlenose dolphin are classified as “endangered,” and the Black Sea common dolphin as “vulnerable.”
Before the full-scale war, the main anthropogenic cause of cetacean mortality was accidental entanglement in nets during industrial fishing for other species. Between 11,8 thousand and 16,2 thousand porpoises were dying this way each year.
However, Russian aggression and disregard for ecology created a whole list of new threats. The four largest threat clusters are:
Hostilities (explosion of naval mines, missile launches, and use of aerial bombs create noises that deprive cetaceans of the ability to hunt and maintain contact with one another);
Spills of petroleum products (even after the Volgonafta accident Russian authorities did not improve tanker safety control);
Destruction of the Kakhovka HPP in June 2023 (then a large amount of contaminated freshwater entered the sea, carrying chemical pollutants and waste);
Spills of vegetable oils after strikes on port infrastructure (in one strike on 26 April 2026 a reservoir holding 6000 tons of sunflower oil at the port of Chornomorsk was destroyed, most of which entered the sea).
How these factors affect cetacean mortality can only be partially assessed. According to data compiled by 20 scientists from Black Sea countries, 913 cetacean strandings were recorded from January–October 2022. This number is at least twice the average level of previous years.
At the same time, according to Ivan Rusev, head of the scientific department of the Tuzlovsky Lyman National Nature Park, about 2500 carcasses were found on the coast during the entire 2022. Over the course of the full-scale war at least 120 thousand died in the Black Sea.
If Russia, through hostilities and petroleum-product spills, damages the entire Black Sea ecological system, most Black Sea countries record that damage only to a limited degree. All Black Sea countries, except Russia, have ratified the international environmental agreement ACCOBAMS. It obliges them to protect cetacean habitats, carry out monitoring and investigate mass mortality events.
ACCOBAMS in 2024–2025 recommended that countries strengthen national reporting networks, cooperate with the emergency group and expand postmortem research capacities. This shows that it is still not possible to reliably assess how many marine mammals died from fuel oil versus from hostilities.
Which of ‘Putin’s people’ actually “won” in this story?
Environmental damage from the fuel oil spill, according to Rosprirodnadzor’s estimate, amounted to 84,94 billion rubles. That figure is deliberately incomplete because it accounts only for Russian and Russia-occupied territory, excluding Ukraine and other Black Sea countries.
According to The Insider’s calculations based on funding decisions, less than 10 billion rubles were spent on cleanup, monitoring, surveying parts and cofferdams that sank, but even these understated amounts will remain uncompensated by the party at fault.
The court found the formal owners of the tankers liable for the damage—owners whose assets intentionally do not allow covering the harm. For Volgonafta-212 the court ordered collection of 49,46 billion rubles from Kamatransoil LLC and Kama Shipping LLC. For Volgonafta-239 the defendant was Volgatransnafta JSC. Since September 2025 court bailiffs have been returning enforcement proceedings against that company, stating they could not establish “the location of the debtor or its assets.”
In this way, the Russian oil company Rosneft actually reaped the benefits from this story, since Rosneftflot did not become either a defendant or a third party in the lawsuits. The company is headed by Igor Sechin, who is connected to Vladimir Putin—he worked under Putin in the Committee for External Relations of the St. Petersburg mayor’s office in 1990–1996, later became deputy head of the presidential administration and chairman of Rosneft.
Beyond informal ties, Putin’s family is directly linked to Sechin by financial flows. Rosneft’s subsidiary, the Arctic Science Center, allocated more than 600 million rubles to the Innopraktika fund of Putin’s daughter Katerina Tikhonova. And Marat Kabaev—the father of Alina Kabaeva, Putin’s partner and mother of his children—became a co-owner of one of Rosneft’s major contractors, Taymir Oil.
Interestingly, Russian authorities’ spending on cleaning up the Volgonafta fuel oil spill amounted to less than 20% of the cost of Sechin’s yacht.
What does a winery near the polluted coast have to do with this?
One key figure who influenced the tankers’ remaining in the Black Sea until mid-December was acting CEO of Rosneftflot JSC, Andriy Bohatenkov. Rosneftflot handles maritime and river transport of Rosneft’s petroleum products.
A year after the tanker disaster Bohatenkov returned to Asian markets—in 2025 he joined the board of directors of the Indian refining company Nayara Energy as a non-executive director. Its largest shareholders are Rosneft itself and Kesani Enterprises Company Limited, which belongs to Singapore’s Trafigura and the Russian investment company United Capital Partners.
Andriy’s wife, Nadiya Bohatenkova, is the sole owner of eight companies with total assets of 161 million rubles. Four of those firms are engaged in viticulture and winemaking in occupied Crimea, and one, KFG “Sarsona Bay,” runs a namesake winemaking project in Sevastopol.
Ironically, Nadiya planted the family’s first vineyards near the beaches polluted by the fuel oil of her husband’s company. While Andriy works in India, Nadiya planned the planting of the next ten hectares of vineyards in Chervonyi Mak, Bakhchisaray district.
The Volgonafta tanker story shows that ecological disasters in Russia are the consequence of a system in which profits and connections prove more important than safety. Despite international obligations, Russian institutions allowed tankers to go to sea, and after the accident failed to quickly stop the spread of fuel oil. Responsibility for the damage was placed on companies that do not have sufficient assets to compensate, while entities tied to the oil business avoided direct financial consequences.
But the biggest problem is that the consequences of this disaster are not limited to the Russian coast and do not disappear when official rescue operations end. The pollution spreads across the Black Sea, threatens marine ecosystems and compounds the harm caused by the war. While Russia avoids responsibility, nature and the countries of the entire Black Sea region continue to pay the price for its actions.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Давній друг Путіна "виграв" у цій історії: як росіяни влаштували екологічну катастрофу в Чорному морі і уникнули відповідальності". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: Channel 24.
