“From here, you can only go on foot,” says Zhanna Rybak, a short woman in sunglasses, stopping at a barrier. Beyond this point is a designated emergency zone, closed to civilian vehicles. Zhanna is here on a spring afternoon with a few other members of a small volunteer group called Nets, Sieve, and Shovel, to clear storm debris from the beach. Normally they'd be collecting fuel oil — but new rules require a special permit for that, and violators can face fines.

The scene is just past the stanitsa of Blagoveshchenskaya, which looks like hundreds of other villages in the Krasnodar region: five or six parallel streets, mismatched fences with small houses peeking over them, chickens and geese wandering the roadsides.

Summer transforms Blagoveshchenskaya entirely. Surfers descend from all over Russia, and the village hosts rounds of the national kitesurfing championship. Locals rely on the income from renting out their homes to visitors during this period, since other work, as they put it, “isn’t exactly plentiful here.”

At least that was the state of things until mid-December 2024, when two oil tankers sank in the Kerch Strait, spilling thousands of tons of heavy fuel oil into the Black Sea. The city's sandy beaches disappeared under a layer of petroleum products that in some places reached 60 centimeters deep. A suffocating chemical smell hung over the coast.

Birds were the first to suffer. Thousands of them, mostly grebes and loons, died from poisoning and toxic exposure, despite volunteers who spent days washing them, working around the clock in the first days of the disaster.

The cleanup is still ongoing. According to local residents, the main phase of oil removal wrapped up in the summer of 2025. Once the bulk of the oil layer had been cleared, sifting equipment moved in. This allowed workers to swap the cleaned surface layer with the deeper sand beneath it, flipping the beach like a layer cake turned upside down.

But the machinery only operates on the resort’s “official beaches,” from Anapa to the village of Vitazevo — just a third of the entire coastline. Beyond that stretches a narrow 30-kilometer band of sandy beaches dotted with glamping sites and surfer bungalows. Volunteers cleaned most of that stretch by hand, usually with shovels.

Part of this area falls within the protected Anapa Peresyp nature reserve, which begins just past Blagoveshchenskaya. Since May 2025, civilian vehicles have been banned from entering, officially to allow cleanup operations and scientific research, though fresh tire tracks are clearly visible beyond the barrier.

This is where Zhanna and her Nets, Sieve, and Shovel teammates are headed today — the Bugaz Spit. They pick up their gear and set off toward the beach.

‘Life went on pause’

The walk from the barrier to the work site is about four kilometers through soft sand, into a steady wind. Leaning into the gusts, Zhanna, a dentist who was born in Russia’s Republic of Bashkortostan and has lived in Anapa since she was six, talks about how she never imagined the cleanup would drag on this long.

“When the tankers went down, I read about it in the news,” she recalls. “It felt distant, like something that had nothing to do with my family’s daily life. Then, on 17 December [two days after the sinking], everything changed.”

Zhanna’s dad, who works at a children’s camp in Anapa, started sending her photos from the oil-covered beach. Then friends started sending her similar photos.

“​​I was reading news and looking at pictures between patients,” she says. “And it was all the same: coastline blackened with fuel oil.”

Petroleum washed up along dozens of kilometers of shoreline near Anapa within two days of the disaster. Authorities declared a local state of emergency. More than a week later, on 26 December, the alert was elevated to the federal level. Local residents and volunteers consider that week “lost”: an earlier federal declaration would have meant a faster, larger-scale response.

“On the 18th, we went to a hardware store, bought bags, shovels, respirators, and headed to the emergency coordination centre,” Zhanna continues. “There were three of us at first, then my husband joined, and another guy after that.”

Going out to collect oil wasn't a deliberate decision as much as an instinct. “When something terrible happens in your own home, you do something about it,” she says. “Our everyday life went on pause. But at the beginning, we had this illusion that it would all be over quickly.”

The heaviest contamination was in the village of Dzhemete.

“In Dzhemete we’d dig in a full shovel’s depth, and there were still two more shovel depths [of oil] below that,” Zhanna says. “Five scoops and the bag was already full. There were an unbelievable number of bags. Alongside us, thousands of volunteers were working shoulder to shoulder — from Anapa, Gelendzhik, Krasnodar. Around New Year’s, people started arriving from other regions too.”

Among them was Anna (not her real name) from Rostov-on-Don. She and her husband saw the photos circulating on social media and, despite official claims that the spill was “localized,” immediately knew something was seriously wrong. They took a few days off work, forgoing their pay, and drove five hundred kilometers.

Everything in those early days was completely chaotic, Anna says. “Hundreds of people around, volunteers everywhere, but not a single representative from any environmental ministry or department,” she tells Veter. “There were emergency responders, yes, but the whole thing felt like it mattered only to ordinary people, not to any official.”

Leaving her husband on the shore, Anna eventually went to the “bird ward,” where volunteers were washing animals clean of oil. “That turned out to be much harder emotionally: watching a helpless bird covered in fuel oil that probably won’t survive the cleaning. I remember thinking that all of Anapa had become one big tragedy. And that I never should have come.”

They spent New Year's in Anapa, then packed up to leave two days later.

“After I got home, I cried for three days,” she tells Veter. “Mostly out of anger that this had happened at all, that hundreds of animals had died. In the end, I’d washed 10 birds in a week and barely managed to fill 20 bags of oil. So the question is — did I actually help? I still can’t answer that.”

Once there were enough volunteers in Dzhemete, Zhanna and her group moved on to where they still work today: the hard-to-reach Bugaz Spit. When most of the spilled oil had been cleared, a new problem emerged: small petroleum particles that a shovel couldn't collect. So the volunteers came up with a sifting method using a frame they called an “easel": someone scoops up sand with a shovel and throws it against the mesh screen, where the small oil fragments catch and stay.

A few weeks after Zhanna’s team moved further up the coast, volunteers arrived from Chernomorsky Rubezh — an organisation linked to the United Russia party. The more experienced locals were brought in as instructors, and Zhanna and her friends kept collecting oil while also showing the newcomers what to do. Then, four months later, Chernomorsky Rubezh announced it was wrapping up operations on the spit as planned — even though plenty of work remained.

“After that, we decided we needed to set up our own NGO,” Zhanna says. They needed a legal entity to have any real standing with emergency services and local authorities: “If you show up as just a regular volunteer, nobody listens. When an NGO comes with a request or a proposal — that’s different.”

By then, she says, the independent volunteers were basically on their own: “Everyone had left, but the cleanup had to continue. We needed a way to build a community around it.”

They didn't spend long on the name. Out on the beach, they'd been sifting sand through screens and setting up catch nets. So they called it: Nets, Sieve, and Shovel. Their relationship with the municipal emergency services is good, according to Zhanna.

“They do what they can — they help coordinate bag removal,” she explained. “And we give them up-to-date information from the remote sections. It’s a symbiosis.”

Emergency services now focus mainly on new oil washing in after storms. The fine-particle cleanup is left almost entirely to volunteers.

‘A troubling pattern’

Starting in 2025, Anapa began receiving large numbers of what locals call “municipal volunteers” — employees of cultural centres and district government offices. Several of them tell Veter that in practice, participation wasn’t optional.

“If someone is sent to do cleanup under threat of being fired or having their pay cut, what kind of motivation do they have?” one volunteer says. “And then they hand the person a shovel and send them to a beach that needs sifting. A shovel is useless there. What can they do? So you’d get this aimless wandering.”

There was, of course, no tourist season in Anapa that summer. Swimming and sunbathing were banned, and anyone who tried was turned back by workers. Cars patrolled the shoreline with loudspeakers warning people about the swimming ban and the heavy machinery operating on the beaches.

On 17 July, the regional emergency situations ministry inspected the closed beaches. Officials found that nine of Anapa's 141 beaches were operating in defiance of the ban. An official statement from the ministry noted that violations carried fines of 100,000 to 300,000 rubles (€1,100–€3,300). Illegal sun lounger rentals and other banned activities were discovered on the central beach and in Vitazevo, among other places. A couple of days later, local journalists retraced the minister's steps and found that everything was running exactly as before his visit.

By early fall 2025, according to the volunteers, any mention of the oil spill had started to get a hostile reception — not just from officials, but also from local residents. For many people, tourist income is their livelihood. Within the city limits, the beaches had largely been cleaned. But on the Anapa Peresyp reserve, which falls under the formal jurisdiction of the Krasnodar Natural Resources Ministry, the situation is different. According to Arina Nedvedskaya, coordinator of another volunteer group called Clean Nature Centre 12–15, volunteers cleared as much oil as they could, and the rest got buried under sand.

“When the wind shifts, old deposits come to the surface — and the volunteers go back out,” Arina explains.

Arina is one of those volunteers who showed up planning to stay for “a couple of days” and never really left Anapa. Originally from Novosibirsk, she had been living in Moscow for two years by December 2024, organizing environmental cleanup days around the city. When she learned about the oil spill, she tells Veter, it wasn’t a question for her: she kept working remotely and went.

She started by washing birds, then took night shifts at the bird recovery station, where she cared for chicks. She then moved to oil collection, then gradually into organizing, working alongside Zhanna Rybak's team.

“In January [2025] I started putting on activities for the volunteers: guitar nights, little gatherings,” Arina says. “When the main organizers left, I stayed on.”

Her family was supportive — except her mother, who didn't get it. “She'd asked me: why aren't you living your own life, why are you always off saving someone somewhere? And I told her, ‘This is my life’.”

In early March 2026, volunteers from Clean Nature Centre 12–15 surveyed both the Bugaz and Vityazevo spits — nearly 30 kilometers of coastline. “We didn't see that many contaminated spots, but most of the oil is either under the sand or under the berms, and none of that has been sifted yet,” Arina says. “There's also a troubling pattern: when a new deposit washes up and there are no volunteers around, the municipal services don't do much about it.”

Meanwhile, the government is actively working to frame the disaster as ancient history. On 27 March, Deputy Prime Minister Vitaly Savelyev told Vesti that Anapa's water “is suitable for use” and that, “if all goes to plan”, the tourist season would open on 1 June. That same day, Krasnodar Governor Veniamin Kondratyev announced that by summer, beaches from Anapa to Vitazevo would be topped with an additional layer of sand brought in from quarries in the Temryuksky district. State media ran statements from Kuban State University researchers saying the oil remaining in the sand “cannot be collected” and that any petroleum residue still occasionally found on beaches “no longer releases harmful substances.” The areas beyond the city got no mention.

Residents had already been complaining that the imported sand contains clay and rocks and looks nothing like Anapa's famous golden beaches. In practice, locals say, crews are burying everything under half a meter of fill and calling it “beach restoration.”

On the Anapa Peresyp reserve, even that isn't happening. The Krasnodar regional emergency operations centre, which tracks the oil cleanup, stated that the sandbars beyond Blagoveshchenskaya are not “beaches designated for recreational use,” so Rospotrebnadzor never took contamination samples there. No specialized equipment operates there either, and since June 2025 even sifting the sand has been prohibited. 

“Scientists are working on the protected territory, studying how petroleum products behave as part of a field research station,” the operations centre said. “It was set up to develop and test different methods of removing oil from sand.”

According to Arina, getting permits has become increasingly difficult in recent months — any cleanup effort, whether for oil or just litter, drags through an unexpectedly long approval process at the Krasnodar Natural Resources Ministry. Arina thinks this is because with tourist season approaching, authorities don't want to give the impression that the emergency is still ongoing.

Volunteers now face real risks for their efforts. In March 2026, authorities filed a report against Ilya Sotnikov for riding an ATV through a protected nature area. He faces a fine of 4,000 rubles (€45) and possible confiscation of the vehicle.

Ilya lives in Blagoveshchenskaya, where he runs a small café that operates mainly during tourist season. In the off-season, he hosts volunteers from other regions who come for the cleanup and pitches in himself; last year he and his father even built a custom sand-sifting trailer. He was using the ATV, he explains, to haul heavy bags off the beach.

The fines and permit delays are discouraging volunteers from other regions who might otherwise come, Arina says. Still, both Clean Nature Centre 12–15 and Nets, Sieve, and Shovel keep going. “We provide people with food and housing,” Arina says. “For anyone who's worked more than 10 days, we partially cover travel costs too. To decompress, we do what we can: karaoke, trips to the banya, board games. Someone even painted pictures. It's beautiful out there.”

‘We’re only asking that people finish what we all started’

On 10 April, 2026, Krasnodar Governor Veniamin Kondratyev reported to President Vladimir Putin that all beaches that had experienced oil discharge would be open this year. He said nothing about the coastline along the Vityazevo and Bugaz spits, where volunteers are still digging out oil deposits.

“You have to understand, we're not against opening the season. We live here. And we know that Anapa can't survive another year without tourists,” says Zhanna Rybak. “We're only asking that people finish what we all started on 17 December, 2024.”

After the governor's public announcement, a major new oil discharge hit Vitazevo, outside Anapa. Regional authorities put out a statement saying “more than 200 oil-covered birds had been found on the Anapa coast over the past two days" — then deleted it. The following day, volunteers working in animal rescue reported more than 130 oil-covered birds. On the evening of 14 April, the emergency operations centre reported yet another petroleum discharge near Anapa's central beach; 89 people were deployed to deal with it.

No one has confirmed the exact source of the new oil. Authorities say the discharges may be connected to drone strikes on civilian vessels rather than to leaks from the sunken tanker wreckage.

“Unfortunately, in some places people can't set foot on the beach without getting oil on them,” says Arina. “Last year, locals say, foot traffic was down about 90 percent compared to before the disaster. But I think people will come this year. The alternative resorts will only get more expensive. What choice do they have?”

This article by Mikhail Arkhangelsky was first published in Russian by media outlet Veter.