How oil tanker disasters changed summer for a Russian resort city

How oil tanker disasters changed summer for a Russian resort city
Daria Dergacheva 27 July 2025 https://globalvoices.org/2025/07/27/how-oil-tanker-disasters-changed-sum...

For now, the coastline is deserted

This article first appeared in Novaya Vkladka on July 14, 2025. An edited version is being republished on Global Voices as part of a content-sharing agreement.

On the morning of December 15 2024, during a storm in the Kerch Strait, two tankers carrying fuel oil, Volgoneft-212 and Volgoneft-239, hit a storm. One vessel broke in half, while the other ran aground 80 kilometres from the port of Taman. As much as 3,700 tons of oil out of the 9,200 being transported in the cargo holds spilled into the sea near the city of Anapa in Krasnodar Krai, a popular Russian resort town.

In mid-June 2025, a Novaya Vkladka reporting team traveled to Anapa to find out how local businesses are managing to make money, what conspiracy theories locals believe in, and why some think the oil tankers sank on purpose.

The catastrophe left the Krasnodar resort without tourists: hotel bookings for June-July 2025 dropped by 30–70 percent compared to the same period last summer. Since late June, guests checking into hotels and health resorts in Anapa have been asked to sign a waiver acknowledging the swimming ban.

Nina Semyonovna spent 12 hours traveling by train from Anapa to Sochi to meet her granddaughter at the airport. Now, they’re heading back. The night train between Anapa and Adler was launched in 2024; before that, a single daily train with seated cars ran during the day. The Anapa airport, like most southern airports in Russia, has been closed since March 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine that February. The only way to reach southern Russia by plane is to fly to Sochi.

“Hopefully it doesn’t get worse!” sighs 35-year-old Ilmira, a realtor who is on a business trip to Anapa. She complains that a compartment ticket from Adler cost more than 5,000 rubles (63.50 USD): “For 12 hours on the road, I think that’s a lot.”

Bad luck

At 6:00 a.m. local time, the train spills drowsy passengers onto the Anapa station platform. Final stop: it’s cloudy; lightly drizzling. From the platform, a line of nine-story new builds and construction cranes are visible.

A brand-new hotel, still without a proper shingle, just one kilometer from Anapa’s central beach, is only half full because — in the words of Alyona, the receptionist — “you can see for yourself what’s happening with the sea.”

By 10:00 a.m., the town looks like an abandoned amusement park. The Zamok Strakha (Castle of Fear), opened during the summer of 2023, is asleep. So is the water park. A girl in front of a shooting gallery mutters quickly as a few passersby trudge past, “Come in, take a shot, pop some balloons.”

There’s some life only at the tankodrome, where two boys around eight years old race around in miniature tanks.

The smell of gasoline is dizzying; the tanks run on real fuel. A woman at the ticket counter explains that adults like the attraction too: “A lot of people from the Special Military Operation come to ride. They send photos back to their guys [on the front line], showing how they’re having fun.” Special Military Operation is how the Russian government refers to its invasion of Ukraine.

Tour kiosk windows remain shuttered, but shops selling colorful shirts, cheap flip-flops, and inflatable rings are slowly opening. Even as the handwritten signs on some cafés read, “Closed,” business owners fondly recall last year's season when Anapa, with its population of 85,000, welcomed 5.5 million tourists. This summer, Nané, the owner of a coffee shop on Terskaya Street, brews coffee and serves pastries herself — she can’t afford staff. “I walked down the street yesterday — everyone’s empty.” she says. “Last year, there were so many people, but this year started in the red. My lease runs through the end of October, and if I close now, I still have to pay the rent. I’m hoping to make at least half back this season, just to cover some of the rent.”

Popular Anapa cafés, once known for summer discos that ran from night until dawn, now stand nearly empty. At the end of May, a giant screen was installed in the square in front of the venues, now showing ads for military contract service and news from the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, where officials talk about “how to build the future world.”

Aleksei, a man in his 40s wearing a light green tank top, makes his living selling tickets for boat trips with music and dancing. His income depends directly on tourists, and there are hardly any. He moved to the resort city from Luhansk Oblast two years ago to join his brother: “Back home, there were three options — work like a dog at the factory like my dad, take a job in utilities, or go to war.”

He’s angry and believes the oil spill was “blown out of proportion because it benefits the authorities.” He suggests that the tankers were “definitely let out in the storm on purpose,” explaining, “If it were an avalanche or a meteor, sure — that’s nature. But viruses, war — that’s man-made. I’m sure they engineered the situation to pocket billions. The administration profited big-time. They allocated, say, 1.5 billion rubles [USD 19 million] for the cleanup. The authorities skimmed off the top, and gave the volunteers some shovel money — but all the self-employed, the small businesses, they’re the ones suffering.” He’s sure the authorities “want to fill Crimean resorts, so they pushed Anapa aside.”

There’s no smell — neither of the sea nor of oil. Few people are around. Women hike up their skirts and wade thigh-deep into the water. Teenage girls film TikToks, laughing. Children dig in the sand.

From the loudspeakers come alternating Soviet songs and a metallic male voice reminding visitors that “swimming is strictly prohibited.” In early June, the area's city hall declared 66 km of coastline, from the village of Veselovka to the Utrish Nature Reserve, a “hazard zone,” banning access to the beaches.

“If there are toxins in the air, then why aren’t we being evacuated?” wonders Anastasia Vdovina, founder of the Anapskaya Kosmetika cosmetics brand. “Most of our schools and kindergartens are right along the shore.”

When the tanker disaster occurred, Vdovina’s production came to a halt: 15 of her employees went to clean birds and collect oil, and she herself coordinated one of the volunteer headquarters. After the New Year holidays, however, several local hotels and restaurants stopped buying her products. By February, her monthly revenue had dropped by 42 percent, and three employees quit.

People have been relocating to where they can earn something. One woman and her family left their apartment in Anapa and moved to Tuapse because her husband's job depends on the tourist season. Come winter, many fear Anapa will become the next Pripyat, a town in Ukraine close to Chernobyl, which has been abandoned since 1986.

According to Vdovina, hoteliers, restaurants, retail outlets, and small manufacturers have been hit hardest, with many being forced to cut costs. Some of her restaurateur friends decided not to open their seasonal cafés at all, while those with scenically located restaurants barely fill up on weekends. The absence of flights, she says, also deters higher-paying guests. Wealthy people choose to fly to other resorts, while residents of Siberia and northern Russia find it too long and expensive to get to Anapa ever since the airport closed in 2022.

Vdovina serves on Anapa’s city council for small and medium-sized businesses. She proposed several support measures to local officials, including subsidies for hotel and restaurant staff salaries to prevent mass layoffs, and support for those buying locally produced goods. None of her ideas were accepted. “It’s like we don’t exist!” she exclaims. “The government finds huge sums to support border regions and even other countries. I get it, I really do. But people live here too, and our problem is being silenced. Are we any worse than those regions? We’re living in hell, too. We don’t know what tomorrow will bring. And this has been going on for seven months. Every second person I know is now living on credit cards.”

The lifting of the sunken tankers in the Kerch Strait is planned for 2026. Until then, locals are being left in limbo.
Rock bottom

The resort village of Vityazevo — hardest hit by the oil spill — looks like a movie set. The Kuban Fair is shuttered, as are stalls selling ice cream, souvenirs, cosmetics, kebabs, and shawarma. Signs on guesthouses read, “Rooms Available,” but according to Anton, a local taxi driver, “Everything’s empty, everything’s idle, everyone’s complaining. It’s a tragedy for Anapa, a disaster in every sense. I think things will bounce back next year. But right now, the city has slipped into some kind of hibernation.

The volunteer headquarters that has been operating since December now lies dormant. Locals say no one has been there for at least a month or two: “We’re at maybe 20 percent of last year’s crowd. It’s hard. We’re not surviving — we’ve hit bottom. That shawarma kiosk across the road? A family business. During the season, they had five people working nonstop. Now, it’s just one.

For now, the coastline is deserted. Black crows swirl in the strong winds as a few vacationers sit on the sand. “It’s practically clean here now, but those sunken tankers still hold a ton of fuel oil, and there’s no tech to raise them,” worries Fyodor, an elderly taxi driver who drives the team through the empty village. “The oil settles at the bottom, then the sea throws it back up. If there’s another leak down there, it’ll all come here.”

He blames the authorities for negligence: “At first, our governor shouted, ‘We’ll handle it ourselves!’ There was [only] locals. The volunteers came later. Rich and poor, everyone was out there with shovels, while the government woke up and finally sent in the emergency services.”

Asked if he’s worried the season is lost, Fyodor bristles: “It’s not all about money. What really gets me is that someone gave the order to send tankers out in that kind of storm. That’s what it's about, money.”

Tours to the clean sea

“They really screwed us with this mazut [oil product]! I used to be on the phone dispatching tours from morning till night — couldn’t even leave the house. But this year we’re finally enjoying life while we’re still young! No tourists, but we actually feel like we live in a resort town. Everything’s for us!” laughs Sergey, an Anapa entrepreneur who has offered his minivan to take the team to the Sea of Azov. This summer, as tourist traffic in Anapa dried up, he began offering “clean sea tours” for 2,500 rubles [USD 32] to beaches an hour away.

Sergey is 50, broad-smiled, with a shaved head and a sun-bronzed chest adorned with a chain and icon pendant. Gesturing to the empty street, he says, “You never see it like this in June! Normally, you’re crawling in traffic ’cause everyone’s walking to the beach.”
In Crimea, bookings are up 40–60 percent compared to last summer. Aleksei, like some others in Anapa’s tourism industry, believes the “panic” around the catastrophe was orchestrated in news media and social networks by the area's competitors. After a pause, he adds, “I even thought, ‘What if Ukraine sabotaged the tankers?’ I wouldn’t be surprised.” Still, he doesn’t regret moving to Anapa in this difficult time: “At least I live by the sea and I’m not hauling bricks.” He heard that “trains for July are completely booked” and hopes the season will be at least somewhat salvageable.

Not profitable

Anapa’s central beach, Zolotoy Pesok (Golden Sand), resembles a giant, wounded animal. Crude tire tracks scar the landscape, a tractor growls behind the dunes, and green nets line the shoreline to collect oil.

He moved to Anapa with his family from another region 15 years ago and started organizing jeep tours. Normally, from May to October, he’d make more than three million rubles (USD 39,000). Things got worse when the Anapa airport closed: “People started coming in their own cars, and they’re not our customers. They ask old ladies in kiosks about routes, then use a GPS and say, ‘Thanks, we’ll get there ourselves!’”

Calling local logistics “ass-backward,” he says that Anapa's poor rail access doesn't help. While the drop in tourists didn’t hit him too hard, mainly because tourism isn’t his only income, he sympathizes with those “who don’t have enough saved to last two or three years.”

Riding in the van are Ivan and his wife Alina, a young couple from Bashkortostan. Ivan fought in Ukraine for two years, was wounded, and is now awaiting discharge.

When Sergey hears this, he lowers his voice: “Brother, you served in the Special Military Operation?” Ivan, nodding, looks exhausted and shaken: “They haunt my dreams…” For the rest of the drive, Sergey curses corruption in Russia and blames Ukraine. He says he can’t stand Ukrainians for electing a government that lied and led them to fascism.

From the back seat, Ivan suddenly speaks up: “They tell us we live better than them. But when we entered Ukrainian villages… Their roads were ten times better. People lived ten times better. Their farm equipment is incredible! We were shocked.”

Alina casually waves off her husband’s story: “I don’t care about the war. I just want a peaceful life.” She’s unemployed, but dreams of importing goods from China to sell in Ufa, adding proudly, “My husband promised to give me the money for it.”

The Azov coast is dotted with the colorful figures of vacationers. Ivan and Alina buy cold beer and head to the beach. Sergey sits down at a café table, pondering why “our leaders benefit from all this mazut nonsense.” He thinks that Governor Veniamin Kondratyev “wants this ‘accident’ to drag on for years,” adding, “Of course he’ll be saying for the next 15 years that everything in Anapa is still being restored.”

Roughly RUB 13 billion (USD 19 million) has been allocated from various budgets for oil cleanup, water quality monitoring, and cofferdam construction to contain the sunken tankers.

As the sun sets, Anapa’s promenade fills with the aroma of cotton candy and grilled meat. Pop music from the early 2000s blares from speakers as half-empty rides glimmer in the amusement park. When the sun finally dips below the horizon, a fighter jet roars overhead. Children reach up, squealing, “Plane! So close!” For a few seconds, the resort is swallowed in a heavy, thunderous noise, then everything falls silent.