Who is to be blamed for the black Sea Oil Spill?

Nobody has ever seen such terrible shipwrecks on the Black Sea before. There is nothing to compare them to – maybe just something from World War II. Last Sunday, six Russian vessels sank in the Kerch Strait. The strength of the wind was more than 30 meters per second and the waves were 4-5 meters high on that day. Around one hundred ships gathered in the southern corner of the Kerch Strait. Kerch port service sent out a storm warning two times on Saturday. However, not all the ships put out to sea – around 50 vessels stayed in the Kerch Strait. Oil tanker, Volgoneft-139, which had been transporting four thousand tons of fuel oil, broke up on Sunday morning. According to official information, 1200 tons of fuel oil spilled into the sea. Four hours after that, dry-cargo vessels Volnogorsk, Nakhichevan and Kovel, which were carrying sulfur on board sank. There were from 2-2.5 thousand tons of sulfur on board each vessel. Dry-cargo vessel Haj Izmail, which had been transporting scrap metal, sank near Sevastopol. Another dry-cargo vessel Vera Voloshina with agricultural equipment ran aground near Sudak. Altogether, six vessels ran aground and two were damaged. Ukrainian rescue teams saved 43 people. They have also found the bodies of three sailors during last week. And as of midday Friday, 20 people were missing.

According to Ukrainian and Russian ministers, the sulfur is in waterproof containers on the seabed. Nestor Shufrych, head of the Ministry for Extraordinary Situations, says that Ukrainian divers have examined the sulfur containers and there is no danger of a sulfur spill as the containers are not damaged. The oil tanker is the most dangerous to the ecosystem and surrounding waters. There were 4077 tons of fuel oil in the holds of tanker Volgoneft-139. Around a thousand tons of fuel oil went to the Russian coast, and around 300 tons – to Ukrainian Tuzla. One ton of oil is able to spread around to 10-12 square kilometers and kills all living creatures under it. The Ministry of Environmental Protection has announced that concentration of oil products in the Kerch Strait is from three to forty times above acceptable levels and in the coastal part near Kavkaz port and Chushka Split, it is 50 times above acceptable levels.

None of the experts are forecasting consequences. “It’s a big ecological catastrophe, the consequences of which will affect nature for the next ten years”, says Professor Viktor Tarasenko, the leader of the Ecology and World association. “The entire ecological chain is affected: plankton, fish and birds. Now, the fuel oil is in cold water and is sinking but in spring, when it will be heated, it will float again to the surface. It will be thrown at the coasts and will damage beaches and Crimean and Russian resorts. It’s a big disaster for at least the next ten years.”

Russian ecologists agree with this point of view. There are no contradictions in the scientists’ opinions about future consequences of the catastrophe. As well as in their opinions that dealing with the catastrophe’s consequences on both sides should be under public control. However, notwithstanding the visibility of mutual understanding between Kyiv and Moscow in their joint efforts (meeting of two prime-ministers Zubkov and Yanukovych in Anapa, creation of a joint commission, institution of criminal proceedings in both countries) both sides continue to dispute and accuse each other every day. But sooner or later it will be necessary to answer the following questions: what is the main cause of the catastrophe, who is going to pay for the damages, what has to be done to prevent such disasters in the future? There are fears that the answers to these questions may be different. Let’s review the main differences in the statements of officials in both countries.

It was decided to pump out the leftover fuel oil in the tanker by joint Ukrainian-Russian forces. And there was the first misunderstanding: on Wednesday Ukrainian inspectors stopped pumping but on Thursday they were punished for that and pumping was resumed. Deputy Head of Russian Environmental Inspection Oleh Mitvol said on Moscow’s Echo radio that the order to stop pumping had been written in unintelligible Ukrainian and he didn’t know the reason for stopping. However, Nestor Shufrych said on 1+1 TV channel that fuel oil pumping was temporarily stopped due to a growing storm and when the storm calmed down they pumped out 935 tons of heated fuel oil. “The Russian Ministry of Environment and Russian Environmental Inspection thank the Ukrainian Ministry of Environmental Protection for their quick resolution of the incident with stopping fuel oil pumping out of the tanker sank in the Kerch Strait,” said the press-service of the Russian Ministry of Environment. So, it is not clear what actually happened there. And it is important since on Wednesday morning several oil spots separated from the tanker and moved toward the Kerch coast.

Russian officials have refuted allegations by Russian ship-owners that Ukrainian port services didn’t warn them about the storm. But still Ukraine hasn’t responded to O.Mitvol’s accusations directed toward the Kerch port administration which, in his words, didn’t give the Russian captains permission to enter a safe haven behind Tuzla Island.

The Russian side didn’t respond to the following statements of Ukrainian Ministers either:

— wrecked vessels have worked more than any feasible service life and were not supposed to be out at the sea and especially transporting such ecologically dangerous cargo;

— “river-sea” type vessels have only one bottom and can’t stand up to such storms with waves over five meters high, and this regulation is clearly defined in the register;

— the captains of the wrecked vessels refused to leave the strait even after the oil tanker broke up; the captain of the Crimea port, according to N.Rudkovsky, forcibly led 51 ships out of the strait to the Sea of Azov.

The Russians also didn’t reply to the statements of the President of Ukraine and the Prime-Minister of Ukraine about the necessity to establish new unified navigation rules in the Kerch Strait i.e. to sign a new agreement between Ukraine and Russia.

It is relevant now to bring up the delimitation of the Sea of Azov. Ukraine insists on establishing the Ukrainian-Russian border on the administrative boundary line between the two former Soviet republics as marked on Soviet maps. In this case, the Kerch-Yenikalsky navigation canal would be Ukrainian. Russia asserts that there are no legitimate Soviet documents that demarcate the waters of the Sea of Azov and Kerch Strait since the administrative boundaries in inland territorial waters between former Soviet republics had never been established. The sense is clear: in this case Ukraine wouldn’t have full control of the Kerch Strait.

And the most important fact is that together with the treaty about the border, agreements on environmental protection, on navigation and on fishing have not been concluded either as all of them are one packet.

Instead of discussing this topic, the Russians teased Ukrainian politicians on the Tuzla Island dam issue. Oleh Mitvol called on Ukraine to “throw away the political aspect” and agree to complete the construction of the dam from Tamani to Tuzla Island in order not to let the fuel oil to move out to the Sea of Azov.

Meanwhile, the Tuzla Island dam issue is overshadowing a very important problem. Scientists and ecologists have forecasted such a catastrophe a long time ago. The thing is that there is a reloading place in that part of Kerch Strait where cargo is reloaded from one ships to another. Ship-owners and captains save a lot of money by reloading ships right in the strait without coming in to port – reloading is cheaper and it is not necessary to pay customs and port duties. “We have warned the authorities many times that reloading shouldn’t be done in such crude ways,” – says Viktor Tarasenko. “Hundreds of ships gather in fore-strait. The waters of strait are polluted when millions of tons of different cargo are reloaded in bulk. All this is seen from the space itself – big areas of dirt on entire northwestern part of the Black Sea coast and in the strait. And now large amounts of fuel oil are added to all this. We’ve been saying all the time that this method of reloading should be forbidden. Ports and berths should be developed and a civilized system of reloading should be setup.”

Borys Panov, director of Southern Research Institute of Marine Environment and Fishing, also thinks that the main cause of the catastrophe is the existing reloading system: “We’ve been saying a dozens of times that this is intolerable. And now the “bomb has exploded.” You see, if there was no reloading, none of those ships would have sunk. Why did almost 150 ships gather there? Because there is a reloading place for millions of tons of different cargo there.”

The reloading issue has not only an ecological aspect but another very important aspect which is not mentioned by Ukrainian authorities. The only person that has announced it in public is Davyd Zhvaniya. In “I think so” program on 1+1 he pointed out the reason for the popularity of reloading (known to almost everybody in Crimea) – contraband. However, he didn’t give any exact examples. And no one can know this for sure: innocent until proven guilty.

Ex-prosecutor of the Crimean Republic Viktor Shemchuk confirmed that the problem of contraband exists: “Everybody knows that everything from chemicals to light oil products (forbidden to reload in the ports) is reloaded there. But I can’t say anything concrete about the volume of contraband. Frontier guard inspection and customs carry out control there. However, I don’t remember any of them sending us documents on reloading violations. So, I can’t say who controls this process and who is in on it.”

Yes, the Ukrainian Ministers are right – until the question of the border is solved, Russian ships are free to go through the canal and warnings of the Crimea port captain are just recommendations for them.

Borys Panov says: “The most terrible thing is that the Kerch Strait is not supervised. It is not included in any of the ecological monitoring programs.”

He remembers that after the epopee with Tuzla dam, Leonid Kuchma signed a decree on annual Kerch Strait monitoring: “They decided to regulate three spheres: to regulate navigation in the strait, to establish engineering security at Tuzla Island (the Crimean Prosecutor’s Office is still looking at where the money for this went) and annual monitoring, for which they didn’t allot any money. So what do we have now? The catastrophes take all the money – we work toward controlling the consequences of these accidents.”

It is very sad that after such a catastrophe, the leading scientists (Southern Research Institute of Marine Environment and Fishing is a world-recognized institute) are not involved in the cleanup. “The ecologists of the Russian Ministry of Environment are complaining too – their actions are limited. There is a lack of full and trustworthy information from the Ukrainian side and from the Russians. There are no expert conclusions – just talk.”

The scientists call upon to the authorities to study the problem of human influence on the Kerch Strait very seriously. The petroleum storage depot in Kavkaz port, the petrochemical terminal at Zhelezny Rog cape, uncontrolled navigation plus oilfield development at the Southern Kerch platform… And all this is almost all unregulated. Where will be the next accident?