Yevgeny Vitishko, who lives in the Russian town of Tuapse, always wears white shirts. But the day a local oil refinery caught fire after a Ukrainian drone strike, he thought that would not be a good idea.<\/p>\n
\u201cI could see droplets of oil and soot on my clothes,\u201d said Mr. Vitishko, 52, a prominent environmental activist. \u201cThe smell was so strong. It\u2019s like you\u2019re standing next to an exhaust pipe.\u201d<\/p>\n
An ecological disaster is unfolding in Tuapse, a resort town and port on the Black Sea. Four drone attacks in April and May, part of a growing campaign of Ukrainian strikes on energy export infrastructure<\/a> deep inside Russia, have caused what Mr. Vitishko called the biggest oil spill along Russia\u2019s Black Sea coast during his lifetime.<\/p>\n Apocalyptic pictures of oil-laden rain and towering clouds of pitch-black smoke have emerged. Dangerous levels of toxins<\/a> have filled the air, the local authorities say, and tons of oil have been released into waterways. Russian officials have refused to publicly estimate how much oil has been spilled, reporting<\/a> only that about one million cubic feet of contaminated pebbles and soil has been removed from the coast line.<\/p>\n More than four years into the fighting, Ukraine is bringing the war home to Russia. Kyiv now produces large numbers of its own long-range drones<\/a> and cruise missiles, and in scores of attacks this year, Ukrainian forces have been firing them at oil facilities and other sites up to 1,000 miles into Russian territory.<\/p>\n The attacks are intended to cut into Russia\u2019s oil revenue just as Moscow expects a windfall from supply disruptions in the Middle East.<\/p>\n On Sunday, Ukraine took aim at the Moscow region<\/a>, targeting the capital\u2019s refinery and a fuel-loading facility northwest of the city in one of the largest waves of attacks of the war. Four people were killed, including three who died in strikes on residential buildings in the Moscow suburbs, officials said.<\/p>\n The Ukrainian attacks have flipped the script in the war. Moscow\u2019s forces have long targeted Ukraine\u2019s civilian infrastructure with missiles and drones. Russia has also caused environmental disasters, including when it blew up a major dam<\/a> in Ukraine in 2023.<\/p>\n The Russian military has struggled to intercept the Ukrainian strikes, lacking enough air defense systems to protect every refinery across the country\u2019s vast geography. The attacks have cost Russia tens of millions of barrels in oil exports, analysts say. Russian energy companies have spent large sums to buy signal jammers, giant metal nets and other protective measures for their facilities.<\/p>\n Beyond the economic costs, the attacks in Tuapse have added an environmental disaster. Bloggers normally loyal to the Russian government have accused Moscow of trying to conceal the scale of the damage, which Mr. Vitishko said would take years to clean up.<\/p>\n The local authorities were initially slow to address the hazards, taking two days to publicly acknowledge dangerous air pollution levels, and three days to order an evacuation of several houses near the refinery.<\/p>\n Municipal officials even went ahead with a tree-planting event<\/a>, lining up participants for promotional photos despite an immense plume of dark smoke in the background.<\/p>\n And cleanup efforts \u2014 apparently with an eye on maintaining tourism revenue \u2014 have focused on the shore, not on the soil or on a river that runs through the city. Sergei Boyko, head of the Tuapse municipality, has promised that the beach season will open<\/a> on June 1 as planned.<\/p>\n Mr. Vitishko, who has traveled along the coast to document the damage, said, \u201cOfficials do not want to see the real scale of the oil spill.\u201d He said that more than 40 miles of coastline had been affected.<\/p>\n Voices like his have become rare in Russia. Independent environmentalists, often seen as a threat to the Kremlin\u2019s authority, have been sidelined and threatened with criminal charges. In 2023, Moscow banned Greenpeace and WWF<\/a>.<\/p>\n Ukrainian strikes on other Russian oil refineries have killed workers and caused fires that took days to put out. The assault on Tuapse, however, \u201cwas the first time an attack on oil infrastructure became a subject of public discussion,\u201d said Eugene Simonov, an environmental expert with the Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Work Group, a research organization.<\/p>\n