Ukrainian officials accused Moscow of recklessness on Sunday after one oil tanker sank and a second vessel ran aground in the Kerch Strait between mainland Russia and occupied Crimea during stormy weather. Dmytro Pletenchuk, Ukraine’s navy spokesperson, said: “These are quite old Russian tankers. You can’t go to sea in such a storm. The Russians violated the operating rules. The result is an accident.”
The Volgoneft-212 tanker snapped in half after being hit by a large wave, with a video showing its bow sticking vertically out of the water. One of the 15 crew members was killed in the incident while 11 others were taken to hospital.
The tanker was carrying 4,300 tonnes of low-grade heavy fuel oil, known as mazut and footage also showed a black oil slick around the vessel. Commentators said the oil products, if spilled into the Black Sea, would cause serious ecological damage to a marine environment already badly affected by war.
Soon after it emerged that a second tanker, the 132-metre Volgoneft 239, was drifting in the same area after sustaining damage. Russia’s emergencies ministry later said it had run aground 80 m from shore near the port of Taman at the south end of the Kerch Strait, which runs between mainland Russia and occupied Crimea.
The ministry later wrote on Telegram that efforts to evacuate the 14-member crew had been suspended because of bad weather. The ministry said rescue teams were in contact with the ship, which had all facilities on board necessary to ensure the lives of the crew were not in danger.
President Vladimir Putin ordered the government to set up a working group to deal with the rescue operation and mitigate the impact of the fuel spill, news agencies cited Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov as saying, after Putin met with the ministers for emergencies and environment.
Ukraine’s SBU security service said on Sunday it had destroyed 40 rail cars carrying fuel to Russian troops in an area of the Zaporizhzhia region Moscow holds in southern Ukraine. The SBU said one of its units had organised a sabotage operation that damaged a rail line as the train was moving near the village of Oleksiivka in a Russian-held part of Zaporizhzhia region. The train was halted, with tanker cars ablaze, and army units fired US-supplied Himars missiles at the site, it said. The account could not be independently verified and Russia made no immediate comment.
Russia on Sunday said its forces had captured villages in two key frontline areas of eastern Ukraine as they advance toward the supply hub of Pokrovsk and the industrial town of Kurakhove. The defence ministry said in a daily briefing that troops had “liberated” the village of Vesely Gai south of Kurakhove and the village of Pushkine south of Pokrovsk, both in the Donetsk region.
A Ukrainian drone struck a campus belonging to Russia’s National Guard on Sunday in the Russian region of Chechnya, as Kyiv continues to strike back after a mass air attack from Moscow. Footage on social media showed a drone swooping low over the Chechen capital, Grozny, 800 kilometres (500 miles) southeast of the frontline in Ukraine, before exploding. No casualties were reported. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov confirmed the drone hit a site belonging to the Akhmat Grozny riot police battalion, and said that two other drones had been shot down by air defences.
