The alert began around 21:00 Moscow time on Tuesday and did not lift until well after dawn. Waves of explosions sounded over the city and Tsemes Bay, a missile warning was declared and cancelled within 6 minutes, and at about 02:25 the attack shifted to the water: naval drones approached the shore and the waterfront was cordoned off. The Sukhumi highway toward Gelendzhik closed for part of the night.
The Krasnodar regional operational headquarters counted drone debris falling on six residential buildings, a commercial building and a construction site. It reported injuries in the city without a consolidated figure, plus one person hurt in Volna on the Taman peninsula. Mayor Andrey Kravchenko said all city services had been put on maximum alert.
The port is the question the morning has not answered. A Ukrainian outlet, citing the Telegram monitor Exilenova+, reported a hit on the port's grain products complex, a facility with two elevators and 300,000 tonnes of storage, and asserted damage to oil and grain infrastructure. No Russian source confirms damage to any oil facility, and the desk found no report of a strike on the CPC terminal at Yuzhnaya Ozereevka or on the Sheskharis complex. The consortium itself has published nothing in its own name since 30 July, so the port's oil side is silent by habit as well as by circumstance.
That silence now has a vessel attached to it. Aegean Dream, the Greek-flagged Suezmax that was among the first vessels through the reopened straits on Sunday, has not transmitted an AIS position since 12:16 UTC on 10 August. Its last fix had it crossing the western Black Sea at 11.9 knots, destination listed as the CPC terminal, and its ETA is unchanged at 06:00 UTC on Thursday 13 August. The gap of more than 40 hours is consistent with a ship running dark through a war zone. The unmoved arrival time is the reason to read it as routine for now. Thursday morning will say which it is.
“The gap of more than 40 hours is consistent with a ship running dark through a war zone.”
The market has already priced the night before this one. Freight assessments for the CPC-to-Mediterranean run reached roughly $400,000 a day by Monday, on Worldscale points more than double mid-June, and war-risk cover for Black Sea calls has doubled since late July to as much as 2% of hull value. Turkey's moratorium proposal, put to both capitals last week, has drawn no answer from either: the only Russian voice remains a Duma defence-committee deputy, and Kyiv has said nothing at all.