More than 7,500 people, many of them volunteers, raced to rescue wildlife and clean up shorelines blighted by mazut, a heavy, low-quality oil product, according to Russian news reports.
Two Russian oil tankers were wrecked in the Kerch Strait over the weekend, coating almost 40 miles of Black Sea coastline in heavy fuel oil.
The Pentagon said on Tuesday that the Greek-flagged oil tanker Sounion, abandoned in the Red Sea after a pirate attack by the Iran-backed Houthi terrorists of Yemen last week, appears to be leaking oil — possibly the prelude to a much-feared environmental catastrophe.
A Greek oil tanker traveling through the Red Sea came under repeated attacks, leaving the vessel “not under command” and drifting ablaze.
The U.S. and UK on Saturday launched a fourth round of “self-defense” airstrikes against 18 targets in Yemen controlled by the Iran-backed Houthi terrorists, destroying missile storage facilities, drones, radars, and one helicopter.
Yemen’s Iran-backed Huthi rebels on Saturday claimed an attack a day earlier on an oil tanker in the Red Sea.
Three stowaways were discovered perched on the rudder of a ship following a journey from Nigeria, and the men were later hospitalized, according to Spanish officials.
An armed drone struck a Liberian-flagged oil tanker named Pacific Zircon off the coast of Oman on Tuesday night.
A Peruvian oil tanker spilled much of its contents into the waters of the Pacific Ocean on Saturday affecting at least two miles of Peru’s central coast after waves sparked by Tonga’s volcanic eruption and tsunami that day in the South Pacific rocked the actively discharging ship, Peruvian government officials said Monday.
The UKMTO warned of a “potential hijack” of a ship off the coast of the United Arab Emirates in the Gulf of Oman, without elaborating.
Western intelligence sources told Fox News on Tuesday that Iran has dispatched another oil tanker to Syria in defiance of U.S. sanctions. Meanwhile, the first sanctions-busting ship was leased to the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in another apparent gesture of defiance to the United States.
The U.S. State Department on Monday warned Greece not to allow the Iranian oil tanker Adrian Darya 1 to dock because the ship is carrying “illicit oil to fuel the Iranian regime’s and Syrian regime’s campaigns of terror and oppression.” Greek officials insisted they have not received a request from the tanker for docking, even though its destination appears to be the Greek port of Kalamata.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry warned of “heavy consequences” on Monday should the United States seize an oil tanker recently released by Gilbraltar after being impounded for six weeks.
Ukrainian state security forces detained a Russian oil tanker in the port of Izmail on Wednesday, seizing documents and questioning the crew before releasing them. Ukraine said the action was taken due to the Russian ship’s involvement in the November 2018 Kerch Strait confrontation, which ended with Russia seizing a Ukrainian ship and imprisoning its 24 crew members.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said on Sunday that Iran’s arguments for seizing a British-flagged oil tanker on Friday are “much more right than those of Gibraltar and London, who are indulging in piracy.”
After a week of insisting it merely assisted a vessel in distress by bringing it to a safe harbor, Iran on Thursday admitted its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – designated a foreign terrorist organization by the United States – seized a foreign oil tanker and took its crew prisoner.
A senior adviser to the Iranian government said on Friday that war is “inevitable” if the United States does not lift sanctions against Iran.
Fuel shortages in the oil-rich country of Venezuela continue to worsen as mass resignations at the state oil company’s tanker fleet cause the delay gasoline shipments
