The tug's operator, Aras Salvage of Istanbul, said the Tedy came under multiple drone attacks during a salvage operation in the Black Sea and that the company had lost two colleagues. The Turkish maritime outlet DenizHaber, which carried the statement on Thursday afternoon, placed the two strikes one after the other near the port of Odesa, with the tug heading for Constanța. Caucasian Knot timed the first to Wednesday morning and the fatal second to the night.
The dead are Aslan Aliyev and Asim Gasimov. Imran Novruzov and Rauf Aliyev are in hospital in Chornomorsk with burns. Azerbaijan's foreign ministry confirmed the four names on Thursday, in a statement APA carried at 13:24 Baku time, said it was coordinating with its missions and with the authorities of the countries concerned, and repeated its call to citizens to avoid regions where military operations continue.
The vessel is about 30 metres long, built in 1995, and sails under the Somali flag; The Insider and Caucasian Knot give its owner as Mert Marine, a Turkish company, and the crew as 10: 4 Azerbaijanis, 3 Turks, 2 Germans and 1 Ukrainian. The Insider matched it to the Russian ministry's statement by type, place and time, and cited tracking data that put its last signal at 16:24 on Tuesday about 40 km south-west of Snake Island.
The ministry's own words, carried by Interfax at 07:53 on Thursday, do not name a ship. On the sea passage to the port of Odesa, it said, two dry-cargo vessels delivering supplies for the Ukrainian armed forces were hit, and a tug escorting them. The company says a salvage operation; DenizHaber says a passage to Romania; the ministry says an escort for military cargo. Nobody in the statements the desk read reconciles the three, and Baku's ministry does not say who fired.
Tedy was the cleanup crew. DenizHaber's last sighting of it was in the Istanbul Strait, towing the bulk carrier Anna S after that ship was hit in the same sea. A salvage tug exists to go where a ship has just been struck; the Tedy was itself struck twice in a day. The war-risk premium the desk has tracked since August is quoted as a share of hull value; the Tedy carried 10 men. That is the desk's reading.
Turkey has the proposal and, so far, only the proposal. On 2 September, on the plane back from Bishkek, Erdogan said a mechanism was needed to secure commercial shipping in the Black Sea permanently. No design has followed. The foreign ministry's press index, which the desk read twice on Thursday, stood at release №174, on an explosion in Syria, with nothing on a Turkish company's tug or on the sea.
Nobody in the statements the desk read reconciles the three, and Baku's ministry does not say who fired.
A mechanism that secures commercial shipping would have to say whether a tug under a Somali flag with Azerbaijani sailors aboard, working an Istanbul company's contract off Odesa, is commercial shipping. Moscow's ministry has answered for itself: an escort for military cargo. Erdogan's sentence does not answer, and nothing Ankara has said since does.
Baku's answer is consular. The statement is about repatriation and a warning; it is not addressed to Kyiv or Moscow, and it does not say what the Tedy was towing or for whom. The same morning Trend printed Azeri Light at $113.32, up 4.75% on the day on the other war, the American-Iranian one, against the $65 written into Azerbaijan's 2026 budget. In a single day the country collected the premium of one war and paid the price of the other, and by Thursday evening only the second had names attached in Baku.