When a 28-year-old volunteer named Nikolay stepped onto a tower beach in a hazmat suit on Russia's Black Sea coast on New Year's Eve, he was almost overwhelmed by the amount of thick film of oil he broke through.
He and other volunteers were told to move away from the oiled sand, but “the scale is too big,” he said.
Four weeks into the new year, President Vladimir V. Putin acknowledged the extent of the disaster and sent top officials to clean up some of the country's most popular beaches after Russia's biggest oil spill.
On December 15, a two-year-old Russian tanker damaged during a heavy storm in the Kerch Strait was released. At least 2,400 metric tons of oil spilled into the sea on December 15.
The disaster in the Bosphorus, which separates the Crimean peninsula from mainland Russia, has raised questions about whether the ships were part of the so-called Shadow fleet To avoid sanctions on Moscow's oil industry, it is sometimes used to operate ships on ships.
Volgoneft-212, one of the vessels of Volgoneft-212, sank and sank, killing one crew member. Another, Volgoneft-239, ran aground near the port of Taman. The two vessels were loaded with a total of 9,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil, and authorities are now trying to contain further spills from the decommissioned vessel, rather than cleaning up the coast.
Russian officials initially claimed it contained debris, but immediately after the disaster, sightings of floating oil and snow-covered birds were reported off Russia's Black Sea coast.
On Thursday, Mr. Putin ordered a report on the state of Russia's tanker fleet and also asked the Prime Minister to review Russian legislation covering oil shipments by sea and river and look at scientific advances in cleaning up similar disasters. His press office said.
Last week, the Ukrainian Navy warned that oil from the wreck could reach Ukraine's Black Sea coast near Odesa and Mykolaiv, but Ukraine's environment ministry said a day later that it saw no immediate threat.
Nikolay was among the hundreds of volunteers who helped clean up. The Moscow entrepreneur looked at information from photos and videos posted by local residents and officials and went to the resort town of Anapa on New Year's Day.
In a phone interview with the New York Times after he returned home, he said he put aside the oil that washed ashore for a week. He asked if he was undressed, which was not used because he was afraid of losing government contracts.
Individuals and businesses scrambled to provide some volunteers with hazmat suits and some basic equipment, but the task was daunting.
“I saw the photos before I came,” Nicholas said. “Yes, it looked bad – but it's different when you see it in real life. You take a shovel and scoop out so much black oil and it feels like a drop in the ocean.”
The air along the coast was so heavy with oil fumes, Nicholas said, that he felt dizzy and weak after walking there without a respirator.
Clean-up crews recovered more than 160,000 tons of contaminated sand and soil, as well as 25 tons of “oil-containing liquids,” as well as 25 tons of “oil-containing liquids” over a distance of about 500 miles. The Ministry of Emergency Situations said this week.
The spill risks a “long-term ecological disaster”, Ukraine has warned, criticizing Russia's slow-moving response to the deadly impact on Black Sea marine life.
Environmentalists say the cleanup of the spill is especially clean because of the tankers' loads. Heavy fuel oil, unlike ordinary regular crude oil, does not stay on the surface of the water, but instead sinks to the bottom.
“If it is not immediately removed from the surface, it has to wait until it is biodegraded by marine microorganisms,” he said. “It could take decades.”
Lacking an immediate response, large masses of polluted sand should be expanded, parts of the beaches around Anapa should be consolidated, according to Georgy Kavanosyan, an independent Russian ecologist and hydrogeologist who arrived at the scene two days after the disaster.
“The oil started to fall on the sand in the early days because there weren't enough responders,” Mr. Kavanosian said.
Satellite pictures Published by Mr Kavanosyan, it showed two stretch marks near the tanker, indicating a new oil spill after two small earthquakes in the area over the weekend.
“This ship is a bombshell,” he said. “The most important thing right now is to get this oil out and get the ship out.”
Authorities said they had recovered most of the oil from the wreck last Monday.
When Mr Putin finally spoke about the disaster, he described it as “one of the most serious environmental problems we have faced in recent years”.
Mr. Putin has sent authorities to oversee the effort. He set up a task force that brought in several ministers to come up with cleanup and reconstruction plans, as well as to remove the tankers.
The longer-term impact of the oil spill on wildlife remains to be seen.
At least 58 dead dolphins have been found so far, the Delfa Dolphin Rescue and Research Center said statement on Saturday. The group sent a team last Friday to reach the sunken tanker and confirm reports that oil was still leaking from it.
“The pollution was all along the route,” he said. “Just five kilometers from the coast, common bottlenose dolphins and harbor porpoises were swimming in a film of oil and small fractions of fuel oil, to our great regret and alarm.”
At least 6,000 oil-soaked birds were caught and cleaned up by volunteers, but many are unlikely to survive, experts said. According to Greenpeace Ukraine, the spills are likely to kill tens of thousands of native birds.
Russian oil companies have increasingly resorted to using junk tankers that are not regulated or insured by western companies.
President Volodymyr Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials have suggested that the 50-year-old tankers are part of Russia's shadow fleet after Moscow was economically punished for the Western nation's invasion of Ukraine.
But Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who has written several articles on the Shadow Navy, said the ships are “rickety old tankers” that typically operate in the Baltic Sea and lack several features of shadow navy vessels under other countries' flags.
Both tankers involved in the spill are Russian, and one of them has had its license suspended and has been put on hold and not set off, according to the state-run RIA Novosti news agency.
It also raised why tankers, originally built for river navigation, were lifted at sea in winter storms in the first place.
Cassandra Vineyard It was reported that Ukraine gave from Kiev.