Long stretches of Russia\u2019s Black Sea coastline are covered in oil spilled by the wreck of two Russian tankers over the weekend, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warning of an \u201cenvironmental disaster.\u201d <\/p>\n
In one video, a bird \u2013 its wings thick with oil \u2013 is seen squawking in distress as it sits in the sand and is buffeted by waves, unable to lift its wings to fly away. <\/p>\n
The oil spill has impacted at least 60 kilometers of coastline, Greenpeace Ukraine said Tuesday. \u201cSeveral towns have declared an emergency situation. The death of birds contaminated with mazut has been recorded,\u201d it said. <\/p>\n
The two tankers \u2013 the Volgoneft 212 and Volgoneft 239 \u2013 were carrying thousands of tons of fuel in the Kerch Strait when they got into peril on Sunday, with winds reaching up to 70 kph (45 mph). A video earlier this week showed the wreck of the Volgoneft 212 washed ashore about 10 kilometers (6 miles) south from the start of the Kerch Bridge in Russia. <\/p>\n
Zelensky slammed Moscow for sending out \u201cold, poorly maintained\u201d vessels into stormy conditions. <\/p>\n
\u201cThese ships were nearly 50 years old. They shouldn\u2019t have been in operation at all, especially in this part of the waters and during this season. Right now, our sea is facing yet another environmental disaster caused by Russia,\u201d Zelensky said Tuesday. <\/p>\n
Ambrey, a maritime security company, said one of the tankers was carrying 4,300 tons of mazut. It said these Soviet-era vessels \u201chave repeatedly broken up and sunk in recent years during heavy weather,\u201d pointing to the wreck of a tanker while at anchor in 2021. Ambrey said Russia was struggling to replace its aging fleet due to Western sanctions. <\/p>\n
Zelensky said Russian President Vladimir Putin \u201cuses these tankers to finance his war,\u201d shipping oil from the Black Sea. <\/p>\n
Veniamin Kondratiev, governor of Russia\u2019s Krasnodar region, said efforts to clean up the oil spills washed ashore were being hampered by stormy weather. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe weather is making the situation more difficult, the storm at sea is not stopping, so it is difficult to predict how long it will take to completely clean up the coast,\u201d Kondratiev said in a Telegram post Tuesday. He said earlier that oil had washed up along tens of kilometers of Russia\u2019s coastline. <\/p>\n
In an address to the Joint Expeditionary Force, a United Kingdom-led Northern European military alliance, which met Tuesday in the Estonian capital Tallinn, Zelensky called on the international community to sanction Russia\u2019s \u201cshadow\u201d tanker fleet. <\/p>\n
\u201cDoing so will not only cut off Russia\u2019s war funding but will also protect nature,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Long stretches of Russia\u2019s Black Sea coastline are covered in oil spilled by the wreck of two Russian tankers over the weekend, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warning of an \u201cenvironmental disaster.\u201d In one video, a bird \u2013 its wings thick with oil \u2013 is seen squawking in distress as it sits in the sand […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6654,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}