Shafaq News – Black Sea

Two oil tankers caught fire in the Black Sea on Friday after what Turkish authorities described as “external impacts,” prompting a major rescue operation off Turkiye’s northwestern coast.

According to Turkiye’s Directorate General of Maritime Affairs, all 45 crew members aboard the two vessels were unharmed. The most recent incident involved the Virat, which reported being “struck” roughly 35 nautical miles offshore, though all 20 crew members were confirmed to be in good condition.

Earlier, the Gambian-flagged Kairos was hit while sailing empty toward Russia’s Novorossiysk port. The vessel reported an explosion and fire 45 kilometers off Kocaeli province, and rescue teams evacuated all 25 crew members as flames continued to burn on board, the maritime authority said.

Turkiye has not specified the cause of either incident, though unconfirmed Russian and Ukrainian media reports suggested the tankers may have been targeted by Ukrainian naval drones—unmanned surface vessels that have become central to Kyiv’s campaign against Russian maritime infrastructure.

Both tankers are listed under Western sanctions targeting Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet,” a network of aging ships used to bypass oil price caps imposed after Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The Kairos was sanctioned by the European Union in May and by the United Kingdom in July, while the Virat has been under US and EU sanctions and had remained idle in the western Black Sea for much of the year.

Maritime intelligence analyst Michelle Wiese Bockmann noted that the Kairos was among 72 vessels recently removed from Gambia’s ship registry over fraudulent certification. “This vessel is flagless, stateless, and any insurance and class is invalidated,” she wrote on X.

The shadow fleet is estimated to number around 600 vessels moving roughly 1.7 million barrels of Russian oil per day, according to Bloomberg.