The Mariam M is 96.7 metres long, 17.4 metres in beam and 8,442 tonnes deadweight, DenizHaber reports from the fleet lists, and sails under Tanzania's flag for a Mersin owner. The Bystre canal is the Ukrainian channel of the Danube delta, close to the Romanian border, the route by which sea-going ships reach Reni and Izmail.
Two casualty counts are on the record. DenizHaber's report of Thursday afternoon, citing Ukraine's Ministry of Reconstruction, Infrastructure and Transport, has one dead, the captain, and 3 wounded. Haber Denizde, a Turkish maritime outlet, wrote on Thursday evening that according to first information the captain and the pilot had died and 13 crew were wounded; DenizHaber's Friday morning headline carries the 2 dead. None of the reports names the dead, and no company statement is among them.
Russia's defence ministry said on Thursday evening that a dry-cargo vessel with military cargo had been hit in the port of Chornomorsk and a second dry-cargo vessel had been struck on passage at sea while delivering military property to the port of Izmail. It named neither ship. Whether the second vessel in that sentence is the Mariam M is not on the record: the ministry's statement puts its target at sea, DenizHaber puts the Mariam M inside the canal.
That statement is one of a series. On 13 September the ministry claimed a dry-cargo ship hit in Odesa; on 14 September, two more in the same port by afternoon and a third by evening; on 16 September, vessels in Chornomorsk; on Thursday morning, 3 dry-cargo ships and a ferry in Chornomorsk, struck with Geran-4 drones; on Thursday evening, the Chornomorsk and Izmail pair; in the night to Friday, another dry-cargo ship in Chornomorsk and a Nova Poshta logistics centre near Odesa where, in the ministry's wording, military cargo from Europe is stored and distributed. Every vessel in every statement is described by its cargo and none by its name.
Turkish owners have had 4 ships hit in the same war in 2 months. On 22 July the dry-cargo ship Reyhan Sari lost its bosun, Savas Cakar, to a Ukrainian drone off Novorossiysk; its owner filed a complaint at the International Criminal Court this week. On 9 September the salvage tug Tedy, Turkish-owned under a Somali flag, was hit twice near Odesa and 2 of its Azerbaijani crew died. Four days later the Turkish-flagged Ro-Ro Lionfish was hit without casualties. Now the Mariam M, the fourth, and the third with dead among the crew.
Ankara's public record has not moved. The foreign ministry's press-release index stands at No. 181, dated 16 September and devoted to the Houthi drone attack on Saudi Arabia; nothing has been posted on the Tedy in the 9 days since its crew died, and nothing on the Mariam M. Hakan Fidan said in Baku on 15 September that the growing number of attacks on civilian vessels in the Black Sea was unacceptable and that Turkey had issued the necessary warnings to the parties.
The shipowners have put numbers on what the warnings have not stopped. Yusuf Yalcin Capoglu, vice president of the Turkish shipowners' association KOSDER, was quoted by Hurriyet Daily News on Thursday as telling Turkish media that the number of vessels passing through the straits had fallen below 30 against a normal count above 200, that operating costs now start at about $2,500 a day and can rise to $7,000, and that a ship bound for Georgia had been struck on its way there, turned back, and been hit again on the way home. Hundreds of ships are waiting at anchor in the Marmara Sea instead.
Every vessel in every statement is described by its cargo and none by its name.
The war at sea has moved twice this month: from hulls to crews, and from Russian ports to Ukrainian ones. Through August the strikes on the record were off the Russian shore; September's are in Odesa, Chornomorsk and now the Danube, described by Moscow as military logistics and, in the Mariam M's case, by the Turkish maritime press as a wheat run. Much of the fleet that carries both sides' cargo is Turkish-owned, and it is paying both sides' bill in seamen.
For the region the operative number is Capoglu's 30. The Middle Corridor's Black Sea leg, the crossing from Georgia's ports that Tbilisi promised this month to double by 2032, runs across a sea where commercial movement through the straits is now less than a sixth of the normal count and a Georgia-bound ship can be hit in both directions. Erdogan's mechanism of 2 September still has no design, and the index that would announce one is on Saudi Arabia.
The watch is short: the ministry's next statement, the owner's first, Ankara's No. 182, and the name the Ukrainian side gives the dead.