According to the Kaliningrad-based environmental group Ecodefense!, some 200 kilometres of shoreline, which includes the Baltiysk and Svetlogorsk resorts and the Kurshkaya Kosa nature reserve, have been saturated with about 200 grams of black oil per square metre—oil the organisation says may have come from an offshore oil rig being built by Russian oil giant Lukoil. Official figures put the affected stretch of beach at 50 kilometres.

Ecologists with Ecodefense!—which, like local authorities, has been collecting accident data—say that the spill, which was distributed equally along the coastline, was the result of some 40 tonnes of black oil seeping into the Baltic Sea. Officials in Kaliningrad—a territory of Russia wedged between Lithuania and the Baltic Sea—would not confirm this, but Ecodefense! ecologists say that “the official version does not correspond to reality.”

Whatever the case, price slashing by the Baltiysk and Svetlogorsk resorts still can’t keep the tourists in the area, who, despite the discounts, are fleeing the contaminated beaches.

Source of Pollution Still Unknown
The pollution was detected a little over two weeks ago and became fully visible on the water’s surface by July 14th. There are several scenarios as to the oil spill’s origin being investigated by Kaliningrad officials. One possibility is that it began to pour out of the Chinese oil tanker Fu Shanghai, which had sunk near the Danish island of Bornholm in June. Another possibility, officials say, is that the oil came from some unknown ship that dumped black oil into the sea and caused the contamination.

A third possibility, forwarded by Kaliningrad’s Ecodefense!, is that the pollution is not black, or fuel, oil at all, but crude oil from Lukoil’s sea-based drilling platform D6, which the Russian oil giant is developing in the Baltic sea a mere 22 kilometres from the Kurshkaya Kosa. The Kurshkaya Kosa or, in English, Curonian Shoal is a national park, a long narrow peninsular strip of land that forms a lagoon along Kaliningrad’s coast. The site was included in World Heritage List of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, or UNESCO, in 2001.

“The commencement of work on the D6 platform coincides suspiciously with the beginning of massive emissions of oil products onto the seashore,” read a statement issued by Ecodefense!. “The company Lukoil will not grant international experts access to the D6 platform even after a UNESCO committee turned to Russia with the demand that it not drill for oil in that spot until an intergovernmental examination was carried out,” the statement continued.

One of the 1,000 postcards sent to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

A Lukoil spokesman, in a telephone interview with Bellona Web from Moscow, said that the D6 platform was still in construction stages, and is not scheduled to start drilling for oil until December. The spokesman added that Lukoil is satisfied with the findings of the official Kaliningrad investigations of the spillage, which indicate that the “oil products are not from the Baltic Sea oil fields.”

But Ecodefense! co-chairman Vladimir Slivyak, in a telephone interview from Kaliningrad, challenged the official findings and said that environmentalists took 15 samples of polluted sea water in order to establish if there is any connection between Lukoil’s D6 work and the coastal contamination.

Slivyak said, however, that his group had not yet found an independent, non-governmental laboratory to conduct the water analyses.

‘The Beaches Are Open’
Kaliningrad officials announced on June 18th that the polluted beaches had already been “practically purified.” More than 4 tonnes, they said, of mixed black oil and sand had been removed.

But Slivyak refuted this claim.

“The authorities are concerned about the massive flight of tourists from the Kaliningrad region,” he said. “In reality, only the area surrounding Baltiysk has been purified, but another 150 kilometres remain polluted.”

Slivyak said that “there are no official data at all” on the state of the polluted beaches. He said that the Sea Inspection—a branch of the Kaliningrad administration—hadn’t even bothered to visit the contaminated beaches. Instead, they issued a cautionary statement saying that even an insignificant oil emission poses a threat to the ecology of the Baltic Sea.

“Official agencies are less than eager to examine the true scale of the pollution,” Slivyak said.

The Kaliningrad Sea Inspection claims that the region doesn’t have the technical resources to liquidate all of the pollution. At the same time, the Kaliningrad administration has declared the beaches safe. As for the local branch of the Ministry of Emergency Services, it has, so far, done nothing to help.

Oil Disasters Becoming a Routine Affair
In the past 10 years, environmental disasters resulting from oil pollution in the Kaliningrad enclave have become regularly recurring events. But many argue that they have not been given due attention.

“The authorities behave the same way everywhere,” Alexander Sutyagin, an environmentalist with the non-profit Baltic Pipeline System Monitoring Project, told Bellona Web. “In the case of oil product spills, they try to underestimate the scale of the disaster and to conceal the real source of pollution.”

As a result, said Sutyagin, liquidating the consequences of an oil spill becomes a little more than a cosmetic procedure that simply concentrates on restoring beaches to what they looked like before.

“Black oil is collected, removed and usually buried close by,” said Sutyagin.

Slivyak said that, so far, the environmental reclamation efforts in Kaliningrad have been even less than cosmetic. “The oil products have seeped into the sand and are lying there,” he said. “They are not visible everywhere, but almost no one even made an effort to remove them.”

According to Slivyak, Kaliningrad’s primitive emergency system is not likely to change soon, even with the prospect of having the Lukoil D6 platform emerging 22 kilometres off its coast. Slivyak noted in a statement Friday that Lukoil’s legal responsibility for cleaning up any spills resulting from the operation of its D6 drilling facility end literally at the shoreline. Lukoil and its D6 Kaliningrad-based partner—Lukoil-Kaliningradmorneft—are only responsible for sopping up whatever oil remains at sea. Cleaning up the contaminated beaches falls to the local branch of the emergency services ministry.

“However, the local authorities still have not established the source of the contamination, the extent of the damage is unknown, the cleanup operation was organised late, and, despite the opinion of experts, an emergency situation has not been declared,” Slivyak said in his organisation’s statement.

Ecodefense! co-chairwoman Alexandra Korolyova

Bellona archive

As has been shown, she said, “the authorities are unprepared for any emergency liquidation of oil spills and Lukoil has, in effect, removed all liability from itself.”

It would seem that the only people interested in obtaining a truthful picture of what occurred are ecologists. It is nonetheless the case that any scandal impacting the Curonian Shoal is fraught with serious consequences. For that reason, Kaliningrad will very likely remain a flashpoint of battles between environmentalists, government authorities and oil companies.

Tankers in Shallow Waters
Lake Ladoga—Europe’s largest lake—was almost polluted by a massive oil spill on July 12th when the oil tanker Okhta ran aground in shallow waters near Shlisselburg Island near St. Petersburg.

The ship, which was en route from Bugrovsky Buoy, on Lake Ladoga, to the port of St. Petersburg via the Neva River, was loaded with 4600 tonnes of black oil when its hull ground into the lake bed.

As a result of the incident, the ship’s ballast tank was breached. The Okhta, however, had a double hull—unlike many Russian tankers—and the lake and the Neva River were spared a massive oil spill. Double hulls, however, do not ensure against serious accidents. The Okhta ran aground against relatively soft silt. A rockier bottom could very well have penetrated both hulls.

But the Okhta incident is likely only the first of many future similar accidents.

As it stands, Lake Ladoga’s water level has fallen, so many tankers laden with tonnes of black oil en route to St. Petersburg’s port are literally dragging their hulls across the lake bed. At the same time, oil transportation from Lake Ladoga and via the Neva River—St. Petersburg’s only source of drinking water—are increasing as Russian oil profits continue to skyrocket on international markets.

According to information furnished to Bellona Web by Sutyagin, not a single project of oil transfer through Lake Ladoga or the Neva has been submitted for approval by regulatory agencies. Only petroleum terminals—for the loading and unloading of oil—are, as a rule, verified by authorities against existing regulations. At the same time, however, more and more petroleum terminals are being built and intensifying tanker traffic, and thus the likelihood of a major accident in the St. Petersburg area.

Russia Objects to Phasing Out Single Hull Vessels
During a recent meeting of the member states of the Helsinki Convention, on June 25th in Bremen, Germany, Russia was the only country to speak out against a proposed ban of single-hulled oil tankers in the Baltic Sea. Russia’s position seemed unreasonable, given that the proposed programme does not immediately prohibit Russia’s outdated, single-hulled tankers from plying the Baltic Sea.

The Bremen meeting produced the so-called Helcom-Bremen Declaration, which was reluctantly adopted by Russia because of certain objections Moscow had to the declaration’s language, said Anne Christine Brusendorff, professional secretary of Helcom, in a telephone interview Friday.

Russia particularly objected to the inclusion in the declaration of the part that said “the semi-enclosed Baltic Sea has a slow water exchange and is therefore particularly sensitive to eutrophication,” meaning that the sea is abundant with accumulation of nutrients that support a dense growth of algae and other organisms. Their decay depletes the shallow waters of oxygen in summer. The many ecosystems living in the sea are consequently easily damaged.

The wording of the declaration, therefore, could lead the International Maritime Organisation to declare the Baltic Sea an especially sensitive area, which would severely limit Russia’s oil shipment privileges, especially in single-hulled tankers.

The Helcom-Bremmen Declaration went on to say that the countries “agree to enhance our co-operation on maritime safety in the framework of the International Maritime Organisation, with the objective of preventing maritime accidents and consequent pollution, through concrete measures, especially concerning the phasing out of single-hulled vessels and the ban on transport of heavy or black oil in single-hulled vessels. Meanwhile, we will regionally seek agreement to ensure the same effect.”

According to Brusendorff, “the regulations on environmental safety and the ban on single-hulled oil tankers concern not only Russia, but all the countries of the Baltic Sea.” According to the International Association of Independent Tanker Owners, a European Commission regulation adopted last year will phase out access to European ports of all single-hulled vessels during the course of the next fifteen years, beginning with the oldest and largest of the tankers, for which the ban will take effect in 2005.

But Russia was intransigent at the Bremen meeting, a posture that may well kill its rights to ship oil through the Danish straights. Thus, Russia’s desire to save money on environmental safeguards, it seems, might once again threaten its profit margin.