A disaster foretold: Three years of aging Russian tankers navigating the globe
The sinking of two old ships in the Black Sea highlights the risks of a practice that has grown exponentially since the invasion of Ukraine
It was only a matter of time. One day after two old oil tankers sank in the Black Sea on Sunday, spilling a significant amount of the fuel they were carrying, that was the prevailing sentiment on Monday among industry insiders. Russia has responded to sanctions on its crude by deploying an aging fleet of ships — some flying Russia’s flag, some not — in an effort to keep its oil exports flowing on the global market. This strategy — which has proven economically beneficial for Russia — has also posed an environmental risk for nearly three years. The first major incident occurred in the Kerch Strait, though the full consequences are still unfolding.
“It’s the chronicle of a disaster foretold,” says Jorge León, vice president of oil analysis at energy consultancy Rystad, who has extensive industry experience. “Everyone said this was an imminent risk, that it was going to happen. So the only surprise is that it took so long to happen,” he explains. Most of the ships operated by Russia, he adds, “were already ready to be scrapped; they were vessels no one else wanted, and Russia bought them.” As a result, safety measures on these ships “are minimal,” says León.
Nearly two decades ago, in November 2007, a tanker from the same fleet sank while navigating the passage from the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea. That tanker was only 29 years old and was more modern than the ships involved in Sunday’s incident. The Volgoneft 212, the first of the two damaged vessels, was 55 years old. It was launched on December 15, 1969, during Leonid Brezhnev’s era in the USSR.
The second ship, the Volgoneft 239, was built in 1973 and had 51 years of service. These tankers were originally longer but were shortened in the 1990s to navigate smaller seas and rivers. The welds connecting the bow and stern failed to withstand the strong winds and rough waves. Just one day before the incident, Russian occupation authorities in Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014, advised against venturing out to sea due to winds reaching up to 50 miles per hour.
The two tankers were carrying about 8,000 tons of fuel combined, and the spill from both vessels could potentially exceed the ecological damage caused in 2007, when around 2,000 tons of fuel were spilled. The rough seas could further disperse the pollution. Additionally, there have been casualties: one sailor from the Volgoneft 212 has died, and two others, including the captain, have been hospitalized in serious condition. All 14 crew members of the Volgoneft 239 were rescued.
At the beginning of this decade, there were around 1,500 Volgoneft-class vessels in service. “We should stop debating the future of the Volgonefts as carriers of dangerous goods; I think we’re playing with fire,” Gennady Yegorov, director of the Russian Maritime Engineering Bureau, wrote in 2020 in the magazine Russian Shipping.
It is unclear whether the two sunken vessels were transporting cargo directly from one dock to another or transferring fuel to other Russian tankers on the high seas. For example, U.S. firm S&P tracked over 3,100 such transfers by Russia’s shadow fleet between April 2023 and April 2024. To be classified as part of this “shadow fleet,” León believes a vessel must meet certain criteria: it must violate European regulations and operate without European-recognized insurance. Many ships in the fleet also disable their GPS signals to avoid detection. “The two tankers involved in the accident meet these criteria,” concludes León.
No transponder
The Volgoneft 212 last activated its transponder on December 3, nearly two weeks before the shipwreck, according to the Krymsky Veter website. Russian media only report that the ship had left Saratov, located along the Volga River, heading for the port of Kavkaz in the Kerch Strait. Officially, the ship is registered in St. Petersburg. According to the Russian news outlet Mash, the vessel was supposed to depart the Kerch Strait on November 30, but it spent over two weeks waiting to unload its fuel.
The Volgoneft 239 had been traveling in and out of the Black Sea in the days before the incident. Russian media report that it had departed from the port of Azov at the mouth of the Don River, bound for Kavkaz, where it was heading before it ran aground just 80 meters from the Taman pier.
Little more is known about the ship, although VesselTracker logs show that it spent a couple of days at the port of Kronstadt last year. Interestingly, the ship is officially registered in Astrakhan, located at the mouth of the Volga River in the Caspian Sea, thousands of miles away.
The shipwreck and spill came just days after the European Union took further steps to try to stop Russia from evading sanctions. The 15th package of EU sanctions, approved last Wednesday, included measures targeting ships from third countries that assist Vladimir Putin’s regime in bypassing the Western blockade — an integral part of the shadow fleet.
Agreement with India
Apart from its shadow fleet, Russia has adopted a second strategy to evade sanctions: selling vast and increasing quantities of crude oil to countries that were not traditionally its top customers. Essentially, Russia is redirecting shipments that were once bound for Western markets to nations like India, which has now become a primary destination for its oil.
Last week, Russian oil giant Rosneft struck a deal with Indian refinery Reliance to sell half a million barrels of oil per day (equivalent to 0.5% of global production and 5% of Russian production) for the next decade. The deal is valued at over $12 billion annually, based on the current exchange rate. This marks the largest such agreement in the history of both countries, with benefits for both parties: Russia secures a market for its oil, which would otherwise be difficult to sell, while India gains access to a critical raw material — one it relies almost entirely on imports for — at a significantly lower price than the international market rate.
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