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Thick toxic fumes and flames rising from the latest Ukrainian drone attack on Rosneft’s Tuapse oil refinery nearly reached the surrounding Caucasus Mountains, CNN reports. Fires from two previous attacks, on April 16 and 20, also took days to extinguish, with toxic substances pouring down like black rain, coating cars and streets in an oily sludge, causing what experts say is the region’s worst environmental disaster in years. "The city is choking on smoke," one resident wrote on social media. It is noted that the city’s oil refinery, located next to the sea terminal, is a key hub for oil refining and export for Russia and has been repeatedly attacked by Ukraine in recent months. "Oil is literally falling from the sky. We can’t breathe. The whole city smells of fuel oil, and it’s dripping onto cars," said businesswoman Elmira Ayrapetyan. Volunteers gathered here in part because it took regional and federal authorities nearly two weeks – and three consecutive attacks – to respond. The publication writes that Russian President Vladimir Putin used the disaster as an excuse to repeat hackneyed accusations against Ukraine of committing "terrorist acts" against Russian civilians and energy infrastructure. At a late-night security meeting, he said the strikes on Tuapse "could potentially lead to serious environmental consequences." Environmental experts hold a slightly different view. Environmentalist and opposition political activist Yevgeny Vitishko stated: "This is a true environmental disaster, at least on a regional scale. Nothing like this has happened for several years." Satellite images and social media videos show oil spilled into the Tuapse River and the sea, with parts of Russia’s southern Black Sea coast still coated in fuel oil, although part of the main beach in Tuapse appeared to have been cleared by Tuesday. Analysis of satellite images showed that traces of oil spread at least 50 kilometers from the shore. "It’s important to note that the situation in Tuapse involves pollution of several environments: the air, the soil over a large area, the river flowing through the city, and the Black Sea. This is an extremely complex environmental disaster, the true scale of which is difficult to assess at this stage," said Russian ecologist Dmitry Lisitsyn.
He also compared the rare phenomenon of oil-laden rain to events in Iran last month, when airstrikes on an oil depot in the capital Tehran caused burning fuel to evaporate into toxic smoke and then oil-laden rain. "The fall of oil residue from the sky in clumps – what can be called ‘oil rain’ – is an extremely rare phenomenon," he said. Vitishko noted that more rapid measures should have been taken, "at a minimum, to isolate children, kindergartens, and schools." Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was "too early to assess" whether authorities should have acted more quickly to prevent environmental and health risks. Ukraine admitted to carrying out all three attacks on the oil refinery "as part of efforts to reduce the military and economic potential of the Russian aggressor." It is noted that for several months, Kyiv has been intensifying long-range drone attacks on critical Russian energy infrastructure in an attempt to cut Moscow’s military budget and complicate military logistics. These attacks continued and even intensified as Moscow profited from the disruptions to global energy supplies caused by the US and Israel’s war with Iran. On Thursday, plumes of smoke rose over another Russian city as energy infrastructure in Perm, located approximately 1,400 kilometers from the Ukrainian border, came under attack for the second day in a row. On Wednesday, Kyiv confirmed it had struck an oil pumping station. The governor of Perm confirmed a drone attack on "one of the industrial facilities." The Tuap oil refinery was already "effectively shut down" following previous Ukrainian drone attacks last fall, said Sumit Ritolia, a senior manager at the analytics firm Kpler. These latest attacks "will delay the resumption of operations and limit product processing and exports even after operations resume." For local businesswoman Ayrapetyan, who helped coordinate volunteer efforts during the previous Black Sea disaster, when two tankers lost their cargo at sea near Anapa in late 2024, this is all too familiar: "In Anapa, we had to wait two weeks for the Ministry of Emergency Situations to arrive. It was a sea of fuel oil. The city didn’t receive the necessary assistance." In her opinion, the situation in Tuapse is much worse and will require significantly greater response efforts. For ecologist Lisitsyn, the lack of information is no less concerning. "Forty years after the Chernobyl disaster, nothing has changed… Back then, there was virtually no information about the level of contamination and its spread among the population, and the situation is very similar now," he explained.
