VIENNA — Russia told a security forum in Vienna on Wednesday that 214 of the 228 attacks on commercial ships in the Azov and Black seas since its military operation began came this year, and that 28 crew members died.
Yulia Zhdanova, who heads the Russian delegation to the OSCE Forum for Security Cooperation, said Kiev tried between June and August, “with the direct support of Western states,” to block economic activity in the region, following what she called “the tactic of total destruction of vessels carrying oil, petroleum products, and food.” The account comes from her statement as TASS reported it.
Zhdanova listed seven major attacks this year on tankers carrying Kazakh oil through the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, and said Ukraine struck a Chevron vessel on July 8. The reporting reviewed here contains no Ukrainian reply.
The figures are Moscow’s, as TASS carried them, and they are not the only count in circulation. In September TEH reported Ukraine’s own tally: its Unmanned Systems Forces said they had hit 285 vessels in ten weeks, mostly small courier tankers feeding Russia’s shadow oil fleet. The two numbers measure different things, one counting attacks on commercial shipping, the other counting vessels struck, and neither has been independently verified.
Kazakhstan sits between them. It holds a stake in the pipeline consortium, and its energy ministry said in August that a complete shutdown “is not being considered” after drone strikes forced a halt, as TEH reported when Kazakhstan ruled out a complete CPC shutdown.
The same day, at an unofficial meeting of the UN Security Council in New York, Russian Foreign Ministry ambassador-at-large Rodion Miroshnik gave a different set of numbers. Since May 2025, he said, Russia has handed over at least 3,976 servicemen and about 208 non-combatants to Ukraine, while Ukraine returned at least 3,886 servicemen and 193 civilians, TASS reported. He credited the restored Istanbul format of negotiations for resuming the swaps.
Zhdanova’s statement, as reported, does not say which of the 28 deaths happened in which attack, or on whose ship.
