The halt this restart closes began on Friday morning, when a tanker scheduled to load turned back and left for open sea after an attempted drone attack on the terminal. The port then stopped accepting crude: storage, in the sources' account, had reached capacity. Loading resumed on Sunday.
The account, carried by gCaptain and republished in Russian by The Moscow Times and EADaily on Monday afternoon, names the Sheskharis terminal, puts the port's capacity at about 700,000 barrels a day, and lists the three grades it loads: Urals, Siberian Light and Kazakhstan's KEBCO. Neither tanker is named.
For Astana the grade matters more than the port. KEBCO is the Kazakh crude that travels Transneft's system to Sheskharis, the leg the energy ministry pointed to on 10 August when it began redistributing barrels away from the CPC route. That leg was hit on 10 August, threatened again on Friday, and shut into Sunday. The redistribution route works, on the days it works.
The sequence also implies the terminal was operating before Friday: a tanker stood scheduled to load that morning, so a restart from the 10 August strike preceded it and never surfaced in the wires this desk reads. Tuesday's morning brief said Sheskharis had entered a fifth day with no reported restart. That was out of date when it published; the Reuters account had been public since Monday afternoon. A dated correction is being appended to the morning piece.
The tanker this desk has tracked all week is still dark. Aegean Dream, a 274-metre hull whose frozen destination field still reads the CPC terminal, has not transmitted since 12:16 UTC on 10 August. Its port-call log records an arrival at Novorossiysk on Sunday evening and a departure on Monday morning, the same days the Reuters sources describe a Suezmax loading and sailing. No report names a vessel, and this desk does not connect the two records.
The redistribution route works, on the days it works.
The CPC consortium itself has not posted in its own name since 30 July. Its marine terminal is a separate berth from Sheskharis, and none of the resumption reports touches CPC Blend. What has restarted is the detour; the line that carried more than 80% of Kazakhstan's oil exports has no dated word of its own.
Overnight into Tuesday, Russia's defence ministry claimed 791 drones downed and included Krasnodar Krai in a list of sixteen affected regions without giving it a count, alongside the waters of the Azov and Black seas. The bulletin, as carried by Fontanka, mentions no strike on Novorossiysk port infrastructure.