As of January 6, the situation with fuel oil pollution of the Crimean coast from the Russian tanker disaster continued to worsen.
Over the past weekend, in addition to the entire coast of Sevastopol and the Opuk nature reserve area, new emissions were recorded in Kerch Geroevka (Eltigen), in Sudak’s Kapsel Bay, in Feodosia’s Ordzhonikidze (Kaidagor), and also in Bakhchisarai’s Beregove (Zamruk), where “there is not much yet. Local residents go and collect it.”
On the southern coast of Crimea, from Balaklava to Sudak, fuel oil is more difficult to detect on the rocky coast, and a north wind has been blowing there for the last few days, driving the pollution out to sea.
At the same time, the local population has a simple question: “Why does everyone see the slick floating and do nothing, but wait for it to crash into the shore, into the birds? Why can’t the slicks in the sea be removed preventively?”
At the same time, the aggressor, even before the occupation of Crimea, received four specialized vessels built by the Azov Ship Repair Plant for the Sevastopol group of its Black Sea fleet, namely two large oil and garbage collectors of Project 14630, “MUS-229” and “MUS-277”, and two smaller ones, Project 25505, “MUS-586” and “MUS-495”.
As of 2020, this entire flotilla was part of the 205th detachment of the aggressor’s auxiliary fleet command, based in the South Bay of Sevastopol, and then “vice-governor” Maria Litovko stated that one of the four vessels was “non-working”, and “modestly kept silent” about the condition of the others.
The aggressor has not withdrawn this entire “formidable flotilla” from the occupied city since 2022, and garbage collectors are not listed among the invaders’ attacked vessels.
This situation has already generated a tsunami of sarcasm in Sevastopol social networks, since it is obvious to the city residents that either the aggressor fleet has rendered its “high-tech” oil garbage collectors unusable, or that it simply lacks the ability to operate them in the “combat conditions” of an oil spill.
Also, on January 5, Sevastopol gauleiter Mikhail Razvozhaev decided, among other things, to “reassure” the city’s population regarding the environmental disaster with fuel oil, saying that “bags of soil contaminated with fuel oil will be taken from Sevastopol beaches to the landfill in Pervomayska Balka,” and that “a specialized Sevastopol company will carry out removal and disposal using its own equipment.”
At the same time, allegedly “a contract is being concluded with our Sevastopol enterprise, which has all the forms of admission, licenses for working with waste of the third hazard class. Now we are loading all the bags onto a tractor, then we put them in the vehicles of a specialized organization,” and “already at the landfill in Pervomayskaya Balka, the contaminated soil will be disposed of using a special technology.”
However, those who know the city’s realities will easily guess that we are talking about an ordinary city-wide landfill opened in 2001, called by the occupiers as the “Pervomayskaya Balka” “solid municipal waste landfill”. It is operated by the so-called “regional operator” “Sevastopol City Improvementl” (“Blahoustroystovo Horoda Sevastopol”), which was transformed in 2018 under the current London inmate Ovsyannikov from a “state unitary enterprise” into an ordinary “LLC”.
The fact that at the mentioned “contract” with this company, as well as at the “glove purchase” that has become a meme, Razvozhaev was going to “have a little breakfast” does not surprise anyone. What is more interesting here is the state of the landfill itself, which has long been a source of environmental problems and without any fuel oil.
The “Pervomayskaya Balka”, which has no alternative for the city, occupies 206 hectares on the 15th kilometer of the Sevastopol-Inkerman highway, and the “first and second stages of the landfill” have long been closed and filled, while in In 2019-2020, the aforementioned “Sevastopol City Improvement” wrote off 24.3 million rubles together with “KrymEcoTechService” for “waste recycling”.
This did not stop gauleiter Razvozhaev, when receiving the “Moscow authorities”, from telling tall tales about the “prospects for building an eco-technopark”. And in July 2024, the occupiers themselves admitted that the “landfill” lacked “degassing pipes that ensure the protection of atmospheric air”, and the existing “water outlet that disperses rainwater does not meet the requirements”.
As the city residents say about the “fuel oil trail” in the “Pervomayskaya Balka”, “there are no special technologies for recycling 80 tons of soil. It can only be stored or covered with clean soil. Or sold, which is more likely”, specifying that “It will be disposed of normally… it will go to some construction site”, and “licenses and all sorts of permits are needed for the correct execution” of such fake “disposal”.
