A Storm, a Spill and a Disaster for the Black Sea’s Beaches

When a 28-year-old volunteer named Nikolai stepped onto a sandy beach on Russia’s Black Sea coast in a hazmat suit just before New Year’s Eve, he was so overwhelmed by the amount of thick oil film that he almost broke down.

He and other volunteers were tasked with shoveling away the oil-drenched sand, but “the scale is just too big,” he said.

Two weeks into the new year, and four weeks after the spill, President Vladimir V. Putin acknowledged the extent of the disaster and dispatched senior officials to deal with Russia’s largest oil spill in years, which has befouled some of the country’s most popular beaches.

The oil was released by two aging Russian tankers that were damaged during a heavy storm in the Kerch Strait on Dec. 15. At least 2,400 metric tons of oil spewed into the sea, Russian officials said.

The disaster in the strait, which separates the Crimean Peninsula from mainland Russia, raised questions about whether the vessels were part of the so-called shadow fleet that Moscow uses to evade sanctions on its oil industry, sometimes employing ships in shoddy conditions.

One of the vessels, the Volgoneft-212, split in half and sank, killing one crew member. The other, the Volgoneft-239, ran aground near the port of Taman. The two vessels were loaded with a total of 9,000 tons of heavy fuel oil, and the authorities are now working not only to clean up the shores, but also to try to contain additional spills from the ship that ran aground.