EU members warn damaged Russian tanker in Mediterranean threatens major environmental incident

Nine EU member states have called for swift coordinated action to deal with a damaged Russian vessel currently drifting between Italy and Malta, The Financial Times reported on Tuesday. 

In a joint letter to EU Commission President Ursula Von De Leyen, the signatories called for collective action to prevent a ”major ecological disaster”, noting that two weeks had now passed since the ship was targeted in a drone strike that Moscow subsequently blamed on the Ukrainians.

According to the letter, the ship, which is currently drifting between Malta and the island of Lampedusa in southern Italy, is in a “precarious condition” and poses an imminent risk to the marine environment. 

The letter also stressed the need to crack down further on Russia’s shadow fleet, the group of ships with opaque ownership structures being used by Moscow to circumvent Western sanctions that allow the country to export its natural resources. 

The Russian-flagged Arctic Metagaz, a ship carrying 450 tons of diesel and liquefied natural gas, was struck by drones in the Mediterranean on 3 March, an incident Moscow blamed on Ukrainian forces, but which Kyiv has neither confirmed nor denied.

In December, Ukrainian forces struck the QENDIL2, another Russian tanker in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Crete. Ukraine later argued that the strike had not risked causing an environmental disaster as the tanker had been empty at the time of the attack.