At the end of December, our Association published the investigation, dedicated to the anniversary of the “Volgoneft” tanker disaster near the Kerch Strait, exposing the actions and negligence of the occupiers in “eliminating” the environmental consequences of polluting the sea with thousands of tons of fuel oil.
Subsequently, these facts were reflected in the press of a number of countries, including France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Turkey.
Two days after our publication, “TASS” hastily published a “press service statement” from the aggressor’s ministry of education and science, claiming that “the fuel oil spill from the “Volgoneft” tankers had no effect on zooplankton on the Crimean shelf of the Black Sea,” citing “a study by a group of Sevastopol scientists from the A.O. Kovalevsky Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas and Sevastopol State University.”
The aggressor’s statement cites Sergei Piontkovsky, a “researcher at the shared-use center ‘Molecular structure of matter'” at the aforementioned “university,” who spoke about “research on the seasonal abundance and biomass” of bivalve larvae and jellyfish larvae (ephyrs) using the vessel “Professor Vodyanitsky”.
However, the haste and tone of these “refutations,” claiming that the researchers allegedly “did not detect any statistically significant differences in jellyfish biomass before and after,” not only raises obvious doubts about their “scientific validity,” but also contradicts the publication of these very “researches” in the aggressor-controlled “scientific journal” “Biodiversity and Sustainable Development,” published in the fall of 2025.
In this article, the same Piontkovsky and another group of “researchers” directly call the fuel oil spill a disaster and state that its environmental consequences “for coastal ecosystems have yet to be assessed.”
And the “scientific methods” employed by its authors, at a minimum, raise a number of questions that are obvious even to the layman. It is claimed that prior to the fuel oil spill, the “Professor Vodyanitsky” allegedly conducted similar “research” in June 2018 and in July-August 2024.
After the spill, these alleged “hydrophysical soundings and plankton sampling of the integral layer” were conducted in March-April, May-June, and August 2025, including in other coastal areas of the Black Sea. Thus, the “researchers” in 2025 simply had no reliable long-term statistical data on the same jellyfish.
The “researchers” themselves admit in the article that they chose the “research” areas in 2025 based on such “authoritative grounds” as “data from Rospotrebnadzor and the Ministry of emergency situations” of the aggressor, which is quite characteristic.
Moreover, in 2025, the same “researchers” claimed to be studying not only jellyfish, but also phytoplankton, as well as fish larvae, and for some reason, they are silent about this data.
However, the article explicitly states that, compared to March 2025, “the average jellyfish biomass on the Crimean shelf” in June 2025 “was lower,” reaching 600 grams per meter, and in August 2025, it decreased to 205 grams per meter. In order to somehow “reconcile” this with the “optimistic conclusions” clearly demanded of the “researchers” by the aggressor, namely that “the fuel oil spill should be considered a short-term, pulsed anthropogenic load on the shelf ecosystem,” the authors of the article made a number of reservations about supposed “seasonal variability” and “variability” ranging “from 49 to 122%.”
That is, without the ability to substantiate any assertions, the authors themselves speak of the “indirectness” of their “conclusions.” The article also mentions “net fishing errors” and “uneven jellyfish catches,” and that “sea conditions did not always allow for plankton net operations.”
However, the “researchers” were forced to add the caveat that “the observed summer decrease may collectively reflect both the impact of fuel oil and seasonality.”
Thus, one can conclude that the aggressor’s propaganda used an article for the current “ministerial refutation” that, despite its bias and scientific groundlessness, does not correspond with the current sponsored “environmental optimism.” It is clear that the aggressor, for obvious reasons, simply has no other “relevant publications.”
