Russian officials warned on Thursday that an oil leak from two damaged tankers had reached the beaches of the annexed Crimea peninsula.
The two ageing tankers, named Volgoneft-212 and the Volgoneft-239, were carrying 9,200 tons of heavy fuel oil when they ran into a storm last month.
They even caused them to start spilling the load into the sea.
President Vladimir Putin said it was an “ecological disaster” and that volunteers had joined the massive cleanup operation.
Over 10,000 people are now working to rescue wildlife and remove tons of sand saturated with mazut — a heavy oil-based fuel, Russian media report.
About 73,000 tons of contaminated sand has already been removed from beaches, of the 200,000 tons officials believe to be affected.
Ukraine blames Russian ‘shadow fleet‘
Ukraine has called the spill “the largest in the Black Sea region in the 21st century,” accusing Russia of using older vessels no longer suitable for the harsh winter conditions in the area.
Kyiv says that, due to Western sanctions against Russian oil and gas companies, Russia has been forced to use a “shadow fleet” of ageing ships to covertly move its supplies to buyers around the world.
“Most of the more than 1,000 tankers of the Russian ‘shadow fleet’ are hopelessly outdated, have fictitious insurance policies, conceal their true owners, and often overload oil at sea. Other large-scale accidents are statistically inevitable,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said last month.
