Russian officials warned Thursday that oil spilled from two damaged tankers has reached the beaches of the Crimean peninsula.
Two older tankers, named Volgoneft-212 and Volgoneft-239, were carrying 9,200 tonnes of heavy fuel oil when they ran aground in a storm last month.
Due to this, they also started dropping things into the sea.
President Vladimir Putin said it was an “ecological disaster” and volunteers joined the massive cleanup campaign.
According to Russian media reports, more than 10,000 people are now working to save wildlife and remove tons of sand saturated with mazut – a heavy oil-based fuel.
About 73,000 tonnes of contaminated sand has already been removed from beaches, with officials believing 200,000 tonnes of sand has been affected.
Ukraine blames Russian ‘shadow fleet’
Ukraine has described the spill as “the largest in the Black Sea region in the 21st century”, and accused Russia of using old ships that are no longer suitable for the harsh winter conditions in the region.
Kiev says that, due to Western sanctions against Russian oil and gas companies, Russia has been forced to use a “shadow fleet” of old ships to secretly move its supplies to buyers around the world. .
“Most of the more than 1,000 tankers in the Russian ‘shadow fleet’ are hopelessly out of date, have fraudulent insurance policies, hide their real owners, and frequently spill oil at sea. Other massive Accidents are statistically inevitable,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said last month.
