ISTANBUL — Eleven men got off the RMS TEAM. The twelfth did not, and by Saturday nobody had found him.
The fire started in the accommodation block and the engine room, according to the notice the vessel’s operator issued on Friday, and then reached the containers stacked on deck. The crew abandoned ship. A vessel nearby picked up eleven of them and rescue services were told about the man still unaccounted for. The operator, working for the Turkish company Akkon Lines, said that on the information available the ship and its cargo might be considered a constructive total loss, which is the insurance term for a hull not worth repairing.
What the notice does not say is who attacked it. It says drone attack and stops. The Turkish maritime trade press that carried the announcement was careful to add that verified statements from competent authorities were still awaited on the circumstances, the attack itself, the condition of the ship and the missing crew member. A day later that is still where the record sits. No government has claimed the strike and no armed force has been blamed by anyone in a position to know.
That gap matters, because the Black Sea this month has been dangerous from both directions, and the reflex to assume an attacker is exactly what the last three weeks should discourage.
On August 3 the Nadezhda, a Turkish-owned ship carrying fresh fruit and vegetables from Russia to Turkey with 22 crew aboard, thirteen of them Turkish nationals, was struck near the Russian port of Novorossiysk. Several seafarers were hurt and three seriously. The captain said six or seven drones had hit the vessel and attributed the attack to Ukraine. A second Turkish ship, the Yasar, was hit in the same stretch of water in the same period.
Four days later the picture reversed. The EMIL, a German-owned bulk carrier flying the Liberian flag, was disabled about 21 nautical miles off Odesa when multiple drones started a fire and damaged its systems. Those drones were Russian. On August 17 the Anna S, also Liberia-flagged, took five drones roughly 20 nautical miles off Novorossiysk. On August 19 Russia’s defence ministry said it had struck a cargo vessel near Odesa which it said was carrying military cargo.
Ankara has been explicit about addressing both capitals rather than one. After the early-August strikes Turkey called on Russia and Ukraine alike to guarantee the safety of commercial navigation, warning that the war spreading across the Black Sea carried multifaceted negative repercussions including for food security. It has since proposed a mechanism to both governments for keeping merchant ships out of the target set. Neither has publicly agreed to one.
The commercial effect is already measurable and is running in both directions. Loadings of dirty tanker cargoes from Russian Black Sea ports fell 62 percent in the last two weeks of July against the previous four-week average, from 2.59 million barrels a day to 0.98 million. At the other end of the sea, Eastern Herald reported this week that no foreign cargo vessel has entered Odesa, Chornomorsk or Pivdennyi since July 22, with Ukrainian ministers now telling parliament the lost customs and export revenue is pushing the state budget off its targets. Two of the world’s larger grain exporters are being squeezed out of the same waterway at once.
The insurance market is where that shows up first. A constructive total loss on a container ship is a claim in the tens of millions, and underwriters price a route on the frequency of exactly this kind of event rather than on who is responsible for it. Ships have been hit near both coasts in three weeks, which is the number that sets a premium.
This is not the first time Turkish tonnage has been caught. Eastern Herald reported in December on Russian strikes on Turkish-owned vessels in Ukrainian ports, which prompted Recep Tayyip Erdogan to press Vladimir Putin for a limited ceasefire covering energy and port infrastructure. In May, Eastern Herald covered Russia’s claim that it had found magnetic mines on the hull of a Turkey-bound gas carrier at Ust-Luga. Ankara has spent two years trying to keep its merchant fleet out of a war it is also trying to mediate.
A good deal about Friday remains unknown. The operator has not published the ship’s flag, its cargo, its route or where in the Black Sea it was when it was hit, and those details would narrow the question of attribution considerably. The nationality of the crew has not been given. The vessel that took the eleven survivors aboard has not been named. Nobody has said whether the missing man went into the water during the abandonment or was in the accommodation block when the fire began. And no coastal state has announced an investigation.
Akkon Lines will file a claim. Ankara will repeat its proposal. Somewhere in the Black Sea a search is presumably still running for one man, and that is the only part of this that is not yet a matter of commercial arithmetic.
Related Posts
