A wave of canceled reservations at sanatoriums and children's and youth camps in the Russian Black Sea resort of Anapa: many people are canceling their vacations due to oil pollution on beaches in the Krasnodar Territory in southern Russia. “Parents do not want to send their children to the dangerous coast“, reports the “Kub Mash“ channel on Telegram. Companies that gave out travel vouchers to their employees as bonuses are also demanding their money back.
The newspaper “Parlamentskaya Gazeta“ Nina Ostanina, the chairwoman of the State Duma's Family Affairs Committee, said that bookings at children's recreation and health centers in Anapa fell by 27% in January, 38% in February, and 40% in the summer.
Serious damage to people and nature
The oil spill was caused on December 15, 2024, by the Russian tankers “Volgoneft-212“ and “Volgoneft-239“ in the Kerch Strait off the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, annexed by Russia. The two tankers are stranded off the coast and continue to leak oil into the sea.
A month after they crashed, the hole in the stern of one of the tankers cannot be closed due to difficult conditions for divers, authorities say. According to official data, about 5,000 of the total 9,200 tons of fuel oil carried by the tankers may have already leaked into the sea. This is heavy fuel oil of the M100 type, part of which is deposited on the seabed, and another part has reached the coast. The oil slick has already spread more than 50 kilometers.
The Russian Emergencies Ministry claims that there is no effective way to collect oil products of this type, but environmentalists assure that such methods were introduced after the sinking of the tanker “Prestige“ off the coast of Spain in 2002. As the weather warms in spring and summer, the problem will worsen, as rising temperatures cause oil products to dissolve in the water, meaning more oil will be dumped on the coast.
10 years to restore ecosystems
Evgeny Simonov of the Working Group that studies the consequences of the war in Ukraine (UWEC) told DW that it will take ten years to restore natural ecosystems. "But for some species, this oil spill could have devastating consequences," the environmentalist warns.
According to Greenpeace, 32 dead dolphins have been found and 1,355 dead birds have been registered by the beginning of January. Anna Yerzak, an expert for the environmental organization for Central and Eastern Europe, explained to DW that high concentrations of hydrocarbons are harmful to fish, which leads to a decrease in populations and disruption of food chains. “In the long term, petroleum products poison sea grasses, which destroys the habitats of many organisms“, says Yerzak.
Evgeni Simonov adds that fuel oil is also dangerous for people who want to swim in the sea. “They will smell an unpleasant smell, they may have difficulty breathing, and carcinogenic effects may also occur“, he warns. Anna Yerzak also warns of toxic fumes, allergic reactions and skin inflammations.
Volunteers criticize the authorities
All volunteers who collect fuel oil from the Black Sea coast or clean the birds wear protective suits. About 10,000 people have already signed up to help deal with the consequences of the pollution. So far, the volunteers have managed to save about 2,500 birds, ecologist Yevgeny Vitishko told DW.
According to DW, the authorities, who initially provided the volunteers with protective suits from China, are increasingly interfering in their work. At a meeting with ministers, Russian President Vladimir Putin asked "official representatives" to get more involved in the cleanup work.
However, the appearance in Anapa of employees of the Ministry of the Environment was marked by a huge scandal: they took about 160 rescued birds and released them into the wild, without the volunteers' knowledge. "They organized a pure PR campaign," a representative of the volunteer team told DW. However, the campaign ended tragically, as the next day almost all the birds were found dead on the shore. The fuel oil was roughly cleaned from their feathers, but the natural heat-protective layer on the feathers cannot be restored in such a short time, ornithologists explain.
After the scandal, the authorities appointed an employee at the volunteer center to also be responsible for media relations. The volunteers accuse her of monitoring their internal communications. According to one of the volunteers, the employee lobbied for a Duma deputy from the ruling United Russia party and was the head of a pro-government movement recruiting volunteers for various aid campaigns across the country. Another volunteer says that since the authorities have increasingly begun to interfere in their work, doubts have arisen about the reliability of the statistics and the methods used. He suspects that local authorities are trying to conceal important information about the ecological disaster in order not to incur the wrath of higher state authorities.