For the third time in 12 days, the Russian Black Sea town of Tuapse woke up to apocalyptic scenes on Tuesday.
Thick toxic gases and flames rising from a recent Ukrainian drone attack on the Rosneft-owned Tuapse refinery have nearly reached the heights of the surrounding Caucasus mountains.
Officials said the fire was extinguished by Thursday morning. Fires from two previous attacks on April 16 and 20 also took several days to extinguish. Toxic substances rained down with black rain, coating cars and roads in oil, leading to what experts called the region’s worst environmental disaster in years.
“The city is choked with smoke,” one resident said on social media.
Located about 110 miles northwest of Sochi, site of the 2014 Winter Olympics, Tuapse is part of a subtropical resort area on the Black Sea coast and was once known as the “Russian Riviera” due to its popularity among Russians as a summer vacation destination. The town’s refinery, attached to a marine terminal, is an important oil processing and export hub for Russia and has been repeatedly targeted by Ukraine in recent months.
“Oil is literally falling from the sky. I can’t breathe. The whole city reeks of heavy oil, dripping onto cars,” Elmira Airapetian, an entrepreneur who runs a brand agency near Krasnodar and came to Tuapse to help with the cleanup, told CNN.
Volunteers flocked here in part because it took local and federal authorities nearly two weeks to respond, and there were three attacks in quick succession.
On Tuesday, the Kremlin acknowledged the situation for the first time, and President Vladimir Putin sent Emergency Situations Minister Alexander Klenkov to the scene to coordinate the fire response. “The situation is not easy, but it is under control,” the minister said.
The governor of the Krasnodar region had used the same words earlier in the day as he surveyed the damage, flames and smoke still clinging to the streets.
President Putin used the disaster as an opportunity to repeat the well-worn accusation that Ukraine is carrying out “terrorist attacks” against Russian civilians and energy infrastructure.
Speaking at a security conference late Tuesday night, he said the attack on Tuapse “could cause serious environmental impacts” but added: “There appears to be no serious threat. People are dealing with the challenges they face on the ground.”
Environmental experts have a somewhat different view.
“This is a real environmental catastrophe, at least on a local scale. We haven’t seen anything like this in years,” ecologist and opposition political activist Evgeny Vitishko told CNN in an interview before Tuesday’s attack.
The oil spilled into the Tuapse River and the sea, and parts of Russia’s southern Black Sea coast remain black with fuel oil, but parts of Tuapse’s main coast appeared to have been cleaned up by Tuesday, according to satellite images and social media videos reviewed by CNN.
A CNN analysis of satellite images from Sunday before the latest attack showed oil trails extending at least 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the coast. Russia’s emergency minister announced on Tuesday that a fence would be erected “immediately” to prevent “possible leakage into the sea.”
“The important thing here is that the situation in Tuapse involves the simultaneous contamination of multiple environments: the air, the extensive soil, the rivers that run through the city, and the Black Sea,” Russian ecologist Dmitry Lisitsyn told CNN. “This is a very complex environmental disaster whose true scale is still difficult to assess at this stage.”
He also compared the rare sight of oil-laden rain to events in Iran last month, when an oil depot in the capital Tehran was bombed, causing burning fuel to evaporate into toxic smoke that later rained oil-laden rain. “Clumps of petroleum residue falling from the sky, so-called ‘oil rains’, are extremely rare,” he says.
“In the future we will definitely see a surge in respiratory diseases and possibly oncological diseases,” said Vitishko, who lives in Tuapse and heads a working group on ecology under the governor’s office. He further speculated that carcinogens can accumulate in the body, especially through water. The Kremlin on Wednesday deflected a CNN question about the long-term health effects of oil pollution.
Vitishko said faster measures should have been taken “at least to isolate children, kindergartens and schools.” Local authorities evacuated residents in areas near the refinery on Tuesday, but health officials only advised them to stay indoors and wear masks two days after the second attack. A citywide school closure was announced for Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, but some kindergartens remained open.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told CNN on Wednesday that it was “too early to assess” whether authorities should have acted sooner to prevent environmental and health risks.
Ukraine acknowledged in a statement released by its General Staff after Tuesday’s attack that all three attacks on the refinery were carried out “as part of efforts to reduce the military and economic potential of the Russian aggressor.”
Kiev has been escalating long-range drone attacks on Russia’s critical energy infrastructure for months, seeking to reduce Russia’s war spending and complicate military logistics. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told reporters in late March that energy supplies are continuing and even increasing as Russia benefits from the disruption in global energy supplies caused by the U.S.-Israel war with Iran, despite “signals” from some allies to scale back.
“If Russia is ready to stop targeting Ukraine’s energy sector, we will not retaliate against the country’s energy sector,” he said. Russia’s repeated attacks on Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure caused widespread power outages, which worsened over four winters during the war.
A plume of smoke rose above another Russian city on Thursday as energy infrastructure in Perm, about 900 miles from the Ukrainian border, came under attack for a second day. Kiev confirmed on Wednesday that an oil pumping station there had been hit. Perm’s governor acknowledged the drone attack on “one of the industrial sites.”
In written comments to CNN, Sumit Litria, a senior manager at commodity information firm Kupler, said the Tuapse refinery was already “virtually offline” after a Ukrainian drone attack last fall. These latest attacks will “delay restart timelines and impose constraints on product handling and exports even if operations resume.”
For local entrepreneur Airapetian, who helped coordinate volunteers during the last Black Sea disaster in late 2024, when two tankers leaked their cargo into the sea near Anapa, this is an all-too-familiar event.
“We in Anapa had to wait two weeks for the Ministry of Emergencies to arrive,” she told CNN, adding that the situation in Tuapse was even worse and would require a much larger response effort.
“It’s a sea of fuel oil,” she said. “The city is not receiving the amount of aid it needs.”
For ecologist Lisitsyn, the lack of information is equally concerning. “It has been 40 years since the Chernobyl disaster, and nothing has changed… There was little information then about the level of contamination and its spread through the population, and it is very similar now.”
