Volunteers clean up the Krasnodar region coast. Photo: Krasnodar Governor Veniamin Kondratyev / Telegram
Russia’s Black Sea coast will not fully recover from a devastating oil spill that took place in December until spring 2026, Russia’s Minister of Natural Resources and Ecology Alexander Kozlov told Vladimir Putin in a video call on Thursday.
The authorities in southern Russia’s Krasnodar region, the area that was worst impacted by the spill, have said they expect to clean up the region’s beaches, which attract thousands of tourists each year, in time for this summer, Kozlov said.
He added that, while thanks to volunteers and emergency workers involved in the clean-up effort, “there should be no oil on the beaches” by then, the “gradual recovery” of the rest of Russia’s Black Sea coastline would take far longer and would likely not be completed until May 2026.
Russia’s Emergencies Ministry said on Saturday that the giant oil slick created by the accident had reached the coastline of the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula and that a federal state of emergency had been declared in Sevastopol, the largest city in Crimea and a major Black Sea port.
However, the Russian-appointed governor of Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvozhaev, sought to play down the seriousness of the state of emergency declaration, insisting that the situation in the city was “stable” and that there had been “no significant oil slicks recorded on the coast”.
Efforts to clean up the spill began in the Krasnodar region on 17 December, two days after two ageing Russian tankers, each carrying over 4,000 tons of oil, ran aground in high winds in the Kerch Strait, which runs between Russian-occupied Crimea and Russia proper.
One expert has called the accident, in which around 2,400 tonnes of oil were spilled into the Black Sea, “21st century Russia’s most serious environmental disaster”. As well as causing the deaths of thousands of birds and dozens of dolphins, the spill has polluted the coastlines of southern Russia and occupied Crimea, even washing up in the southern Ukrainian port of Odesa.
