It was a matter of time. A day after two old oil tankers sank last Sunday in the Black Sea, spilling a significant amount of the fuel they were carrying, that is the feeling that prevailed this Monday among those who know the ins and outs of the sector. Russia has responded to the sanctions on its crude oil by putting into circulation an old fleet of shadow ships, with or without the flag of the Eurasian country, with which to avoid the total exit of its production from the global market. The strategy – relatively successful for its interests from an economic point of view – has been putting the environment at risk for almost three years. With a first serious case, although with consequences yet to be determined, in the Kerch Strait.
“It is the chronicle of a disaster foretold,” says Jorge León, vice president of oil analysis at the energy consulting firm Rystad and with a very extensive career. “Everyone said that this was an imminent risk, that it was something that was going to happen. So the news is almost that it took so long to happen,” he points out on the other end of the phone. Most of the ships that Russia operates, he says, “were already ready for scrapping, they were vessels that no one wanted and that they bought.” The security measures of these vessels, ditch, “are minimal.”
Almost two decades ago, in November 2007, a boat from the same family as those shipwrecked this Sunday sank in the passage from the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea. That tanker was even more modern and was only 29 years old when it broke in half. This Sunday, the hull of the Volgoneft 212 ship creaked in a similar way on the day it turned 55: it was launched on December 15, 1969, when Leonid Brezhnev had barely come to power in the former USSR.
The second vessel involved, the Volgoneft 239, also suffered damage. It had been built in 1973 and had 51 years of service behind it. These tankers were originally longer, but in the 1990s they were shortened to be able to navigate across seas and rivers. The weld that joined the bow and stern did not resist the wind and waves. A day before the event, the Russian occupying authorities, who annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014, recommended not going out to sea due to winds of up to 80 kilometers per hour in the area.
Both vessels together were transporting about 8,000 tons of fuel, so the spill of both threatens to multiply by four the ecological catastrophe of 2007, when about 2,000 tons of fuel were spilled. Additionally, rough seas can further disperse pollution. There have also been casualties: one sailor from Volgoneft 212 has died and two others have been hospitalized and are in serious condition, including their captain. All 14 crew members of Volgoneft 239 have been rescued.
At the beginning of this decade, the Volgoneft class fleet had around 1,500 active vessels. “We must stop discussing the future of the Volgoneft as transports of dangerous goods, I think we are playing to the limit,” the director of the Russian Maritime Engineering Bureau, Gennady Yégorov, wrote in 2020 in the magazine Russian Ship.
It is unknown whether the two wrecked ships were transporting cargo directly from one dock to another or transferring fuel to other Russian oil tankers on the high seas. For example, the American firm S&P detected more than 3,100 practices of this type by the Russian shadow fleet between April 2023 and the same month of this year. For a ship to be classified as part of that shadow fleet or ghost fleet, León believes, it must meet the following requirements: not comply with European legislation and not operate with insurance recognized in Europe. Many of them also turn off the GPS signal to avoid being detected. “The two oil tankers involved in the accident meet these requirements,” concludes the Rystad Energy analyst.
Without transponder
The last time the Volgoneft 212 activated its transponder was on December 3, almost two weeks before the shipwreck, according to the portal Krimski Veter. The Russian media only reported that the ship had left Saratov, in the middle of the Volga River, heading to the port of Kavkaz, in the Kerch Strait, although it is officially registered in the port of Saint Petersburg. According to the Russian news channel Mash, the ship was supposed to have left the Kerch Strait on November 30, but was waiting for more than two weeks to unload its fuel.
For its part, the Volgoneft 239 had been entering and exiting the middle of the Black Sea in the days before the accident. The Russian press suggests that it had departed from the port of Azov, at the mouth of the Don River, and its final destination was Kavkaz, where it was headed before running aground about 80 meters from the Taman pier, very close to its destination.
There is not much more information about the ship either, although according to the VesselTracker record, last year it spent a couple of days in the port of Kronstadt. Interestingly, the vessel is registered in Astrakhan as its home port. This region is located at the mouth of the Volga into the Caspian Sea, thousands of kilometers away.
The shipwreck, and the subsequent spill, come just a few days after the European Union took another step in its string of sanctions to try to stop this practice: the fifteenth package of measures, approved last Wednesday, contained punitive measures on the ships from third countries that help Vladimir Putin’s regime to evade the Western blockade. An essential, although not unique, part of the ghost fleet.
Agreement with India
Aside from the shadow fleet, the second way chosen by Russia to avoid sanctions is the sale of huge (and growing) quantities of crude oil to countries that until now were not listed as the Kremlin’s first client. Finally, redirect shipments that were previously headed to the West to countries like India, which has become one of the priority destinations for that oil.
Last week, the Moscow giant Rosneft agreed with the Indian refiner Reliance to sell half a million barrels a day (0.5% of global production and 5% of Russian production, which is said to be soon) throughout the next decade in exchange for just over 12,000 million euros annually, at the current exchange rate. It is the largest agreement of its kind in the history of both countries, in which both parties win: Russia supplies crude oil that would otherwise be difficult to sell, and the Asian country obtains an essential raw material, on which it depends. almost entirely from exports, at a price much lower than that set by international markets.
