Turkish authorities on Friday said they had taken crews off two oil tankers in the Black Sea after explosions and fires, suggesting they may have been hit by devices.<\/p>\n
The Directorate General of Maritime Affairs wrote on X that the Kairos, which was empty and en route to the Russian port of Novorossiysk, caught fire 28 nautical miles (52 kilometers) off the Turkish coast “due to external causes.”<\/p>\n
“All 25 crew members are safe and sound,” it added.<\/p>\n
Flames and thick black smoke were visible at the bow of the vessel. No sea pollution was immediately reported.<\/p>\n
The fire broke out on the Gambian-flagged Kairos at about 6:00 p.m. off Kefken, in Turkey’s northern Kocaeli province, its Governor Ilhami Aktas told the private NTV channel.<\/p>\n
A second oil tanker, the Virat, “reported being hit approximately 35 nautical miles away,” the directorate said, without specifying the nature of the impact.<\/p>\n
“Rescue teams and a cargo vessel were sent to the scene. The 20 crew members are safe and sound and thick smoke was detected in the engine room,” it added.<\/p>\n
The Virat is also Gambian-flagged, according to the Vesselfinder website.<\/p>\n
“An external cause means the vessel was hit by a mine, a rocket or a similar projectile, or by a drone, or by an unmanned underwater vehicle,”\u00a0Turkish Transport Minister Abdulkadir Uraloglu said on NTV.<\/p>\n
The two tankers are under Western sanctions for transporting oil from Russian ports despite an embargo imposed after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.<\/p>\n
The minister said the 25 crew members from the Kairos were evacuated safely and rescue teams had also reached the Virat.<\/p>\n
“Their health and safety are not at risk,” he said.<\/p>\n
“No pollution has been detected so far, but we are monitoring the fire’s progress.”<\/p>\n
A number of naval mines have been located and destroyed in the Black Sea since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.<\/p>\n
The mines, placed by both sides to protect the coastline, have since drifted, particularly during storms.<\/p>\n
NATO members Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania, which all have a coastline on the Black Sea, established a naval Mine Countermeasures Group in 2024 in response to\u00a0the danger.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Turkish authorities on Friday said they had taken crews off two oil tankers in the Black Sea after…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":412282,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[94588,50,270,193755,24922,103],"class_list":{"0":"post-412281","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-black-sea","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-oil","11":"tag-shadow-fleet","12":"tag-turkey","13":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412281\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/412282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}