An emergency task force arrived in Russia’s southern Krasnodar region on Sunday as an oil slick in the Kerch Strait from two storm-hit tankers continues to spread a month after it was first discovered, officials said.
The task force, which includes Emergency Situations Minister Alexander Kurenkov, was established after Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday called on authorities to step up the response to the spill, calling it “one of the most serious environmental challenges we have faced in recent years.”
Kurenkov said the “most difficult situation” has developed near the port of Taman in the Krasnodar region, where fuel oil continues to flow into the sea from the damaged part of the tanker Volgoneft-239.
Kurenkova was quoted by the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti as saying that the remaining oil would be pumped out of the stern of the tanker.
The Emergencies Ministry said on Saturday that more than 155,000 tonnes of contaminated sand and soil had been collected since oil spilled from two tankers during a storm four weeks ago in the Kerch Strait, which separates the Russian-occupied Crimea peninsula from the Krasnodar region.
Officials posted by Russia in Ukraine’s partially Russian-occupied region of Zaporizhzhia said Saturday that fuel oil – a low-grade heavy oil product – had reached the Berdyansky splash, some 145 kilometers (90 miles) north of the Kerch Strait. It contaminated an area 14 1/2 kilometers (9 miles) long, Moscow Governor Yevgeny Balitsky wrote on Telegram.
Russian-appointed officials in Moscow-occupied Crimea declared a regional state of emergency last weekend after oil was discovered off the coast of Sevastopol, the peninsula’s largest city, about 250 kilometers (155 miles) from the Kerch Strait.
In response to Putin’s call for action, Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Heorhii Tykhyi accused Russia of “starting to show its supposed ‘concern’ only after the scale of the disaster became too obvious to mask its dire consequences.”
“Russia’s practice of first ignoring the problem, then admitting its inability to solve it and finally leaving the entire Black Sea region alone with the consequences is another proof of its international irresponsibility,” Tykhyi said on Friday.
The Kerch Strait is an important global maritime route, which enables passage from the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea. It has also been a key point of conflict between Russia and Ukraine since Moscow annexed the peninsula in 2014.
In 2016, Ukraine took Moscow to the Permanent Court of Arbitration, where it accused Russia of trying to illegally take control of the area. In 2021, Russia closed the strait for several months.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, described last month’s oil spill as a “large-scale environmental disaster” and called for additional sanctions against Russian tankers.
