Two Sunken Tankers at Kerch Strait Were Refueling Russia's Dark Fleet
The two river-sea tankers that broke up near the Kerch Strait last month were part of a flotilla that bunkers Russia's "dark fleet," including at least three U.S.-sanctioned deep sea tankers, according to Russian investigative news outlet IStories. Many of their sister ships continue in the same trade today, and many are operating beyond the limits outlined in their registration papers, documents obtained by the outlet suggest.
Volgoneft-212 and -239 were built between 1969 and 1973, produced under a major Soviet construction program that delivered hundreds of ships for the Black Sea-Volga "river-sea" tanker and freighter fleet. Both broke up in a storm on December 15, spilling an estimated 2,000-3,000 tonnes of bunker fuel into the Black Sea. Cleanup efforts are still under way.
"The problem with the Volgoneft type vessels has been known for a long time. These vessels are declared as 'river-sea' class, but in fact in Soviet times they were used for river shipping, at most with an exit to the bay at the river mouth. They were not intended for full-fledged sea shipping," said Yuri Kurnakov, chairman of Russia's Marine Trade Union, in an interview in December.
In 2013, Russian Marine Engineering Bureau director Gennady Egorov published a technical review of the class' design and its maintenance challenges. The Soviet naval architects who designed the Volgoneft tanker fleet relied on a mix of standard plate and thinner, higher-strength steel to reduce weight for the shallow-draft riverine vessels, increasing their cargo capacity but creating areas that were prone to serious cracking. All of these ships have spent 50 years or more transiting through a series of locks on the Volga, and after decades of contact with fendering, their hull plating is deeply indented between the scantlings. In a refit program in the 2010s, a few of these tankers had the entire cargo section cropped out and replaced due to corrosion and cracking - everything between the pump room and the forepeak bulkhead.
"In the long term, ensuring sustainable safe transportation of oil and oil products on tankers of mixed river-sea navigation is possible only through new shipbuilding," concluded Egorov, writing 12 years ago.
According to IStories, these aging riverine tankers are now employed to transport thousands of tonnes of bunker fuel from Russian refineries to a transshipment zone off Kavkaz, at the southern entrance to the Kerch Strait. There, they rendezvous with dark fleet tankers or - more often - with a designated storage and offloading tanker, identified as the Firn (ex name SCF Caucasus). The fuel carried by the Volgoneft fleet helps Russia's sanctions-busting oil export tankers to keep moving, according to IStories, including the dark fleet vessels Triumph, NS Spirit, Utaki, Beks Iron and Sezar. In all, an estimated 660,000 tonnes of bunker fuel moved from refineries to "shadow fleet" vessels aboard the Volgoneft fleet over the last year, the outlet concluded.
Triumph and NS Silver are both under U.S. sanctions. In addition, Firn has transloaded bunker fuel from the Volgoneft fleet onto at least one other sanctioned tanker, the Mum.