Ukraine again attacked an oil tanker in the Black Sea on Wednesday according to a source in Ukraine’s security services, saying the vessel is part of the “Russian ghost fleet”.
kyiv, which faces almost four years of massive Russian invasion, has recently intensified its strikes against oil ships circulating in the Black Sea and which it accuses of being used by Moscow to circumvent Western sanctions and finance its offensive in Ukraine.
On Wednesday, naval drones “struck the oil ship Dashan, which belongs to Russia’s ‘ghost fleet’, in the Black Sea” and inflicted “critical damage”, a source within Ukrainian military intelligence GUR told AFP.
Ukrainian forces already claimed responsibility in November for the attack on two other oil tankers near the Turkish coast, angering Ankara, which warned both kyiv and Moscow that these attacks in the Black Sea represent a “worrying escalation”.
Turkey, which maintains relations with both Moscow and kyiv, controls the Bosphorus Strait, a key passage for the transport of Ukrainian grain and Russian oil to the Mediterranean.
A major oil terminal near the southern Russian port of Novorossiysk also halted operations in late November after a Ukrainian naval drone attack damaged one of its three mooring points.
