The catastrophe that occurred on December 15 in the waters of the Black Sea south of the Kerch Strait with the Russian tankers “Volgoneft-212”, IMO number 7024976, of Perm’s “Kama Shipping” and “Volgoneft-239”, IMO number 7024976, of Moscow’s “Volgatransneft”, which were transporting a total of more than 8 thousand tons of fuel oil, due to the impossibility of remaining silent about this obvious fact, predictably led to the appearance in the aggressor’s propaganda, including the “Crimean” one, of many different fabrications.
At first, with reference to the Moscow Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, it was stated that allegedly “currents and winds cannot bring the spilled fuel oil to Crimea, Anapa and Sochi”, which would allegedly be “blown away and carried by currents to the center of the Black Sea”.
However, this is obviously not the case, and the “addressees” of a large-scale spill of oil products, as shown by the map of currents in this water area, will be the southern coast of the Kerch Strait and the shores of Eastern Crimea, right up to the Opuksky Nature Reserve, Feodosia and Sudak. Later, this was grimly acknowledged by the “department of geoecology of the Crimean Federal University”.
Head of Department of the Marine Hydrophysical Institute Sergei Stanichny stated that “as a result of the wreck of the tankers, fuel oil spilled into the sea, which is drifting to the coast in the area from Cape Panagia to the Tuzla Spit”, but this is clearly not the limits of the future pollution zone.
“Greenpeace” spokesman Paul Johnson pointed out that “any spill of oil or petroleum products in these waters could have serious consequences, depending on the prevailing winds and currents, which are currently moving northeast, and in the current weather conditions, a spill would be very difficult to localize”.
Considering that the “Volgoneft-212” simply broke off in the sea, and its bow sank, and that the damaged “Volgoneft-239” was actually thrown onto the Caucasian coast, it is difficult to disagree with the position of “Greenpeace”.
And therefore the “Crimean media” began to hastily broadcast such a “seaman” as the “first minister of state security” of the Russian terrorists in Donetsk, “political observer” Andrey Pinchuk.
This “petrel” stated that, allegedly, “the tragedy was not just an accident”, and, traditionally hinting at some “NATO machinations”, declared that allegedly “it is necessary to understand who made the decision and what they were guided by when they took the ships out in such weather”, “was it a malicious decision” and “investigate the situation for the purpose of committing terrorist acts to destroy these ships”, immediately accusing all environmentalists wholesale as “a very convenient platform for the activities of various special services”.
Naturally, in a situation where the very moment of the catastrophe of ancient, half-century-old tankers, with classification documents from such an “authoritative” structure as the “Russian Classification Society” (former “Russian River Register”), in principle not intended for maritime shipping, was captured on video and in monitoring systems, stories about some alleged “terrorists” will be broadcast only by the outright information dumps of the aggressor.
Even such a “colleague” of Pinchuk as Oleg Tsarev sarcastically stated on this occasion that for Russian punishers “it is always important to find the real culprit – the scapegoat and put him in jail. To react”.
Kerch residents have become more straightforward, writing in social networks such things as: “Everything has rotted. Rusty old stuff. People have been killed. There is no forgiveness”; “There are many photos of this miracle monster still afloat, it doesn’t look very good, but someone gave out the register”; “I wonder if at least one of the culprits will go to jail? Or only the boatswain? What about those who shortened these troughs, accepted them into operation, exploited them, chartered them”.
But there is something else that is noteworthy here: as some media outlets write, in recent months the tankers “Volgoneft-212” and “Volgoneft-239” have been moving between the port of Kavkaz in the Kerch Strait and the berths of Russian oil refineries on the Volga.
Thus, “Volgoneft-212” has been loaded with fuel oil twice in the last six months at the Saratov Oil Refinery and once the tanker delivered export heavy oil fuel from the Syzran Oil Refinery; both of these plants belong to “Rosneft”.
At the same time, the owner of the tanker “Volgoneft-239”, the company “Volgatransneft”, won a tender in 2017 to transport “Rosneft” products “in the southern direction on the territory of Russia until 2022”; the cost of the contract for the transportation of 1.5 million tons of oil products amounted to about 3 billion rubles. Moreover, both tankers had been at sea for a long time at the beginning of the storm and had not returned to ports, despite obvious meteorological forecasts.
And therefore, the aggressor’s punishers in this situation will have to solve the traditional “three-body problem”: while vigorously “investigating” the catastrophe, “not to get to themselves”, that is, to that sanctioned “Rosneft”.
