The Yanina went down first. At least two Ukrainian drones, on Rosatom’s account, struck the FESCO container ship near Novorossiysk early on Saturday 1 August, and it sank with frozen food and construction materials aboard. All 17 crew were rescued, the company said.
“This cannot be interpreted as anything other than piracy and robbery at sea,” Rosatom chief Alexei Likhachev said.
Late on Monday the drones found the Nadezhda, a ro-ro run by Turkey’s Kalyoncu Ro Ro Denizcilik, carrying vegetables and fruit from Samsun to Novorossiysk. The captain counted 6 or 7 of them. Fire took the bow and the living quarters about 20 nautical miles from port, on the account of Turkey’s maritime directorate, which reported 3 crew members in grave condition; Russian reports count 4 wounded, 3 of them Turkish citizens. Russian naval vessels took all 22 sailors off. In its late-evening statement the directorate said the fire was still burning and that work near the hull remained impossible while the drone threat persisted. No Ukrainian statement on either vessel has surfaced in the wires.
Neither ship carried oil, and that is the point. Turkish shipping has now been hit on both shores inside a week: the corn carrier ATA-2 was struck off Ukraine’s Chornomorsk on 30 July, by Türkiye Today’s count the 11th Turkish or Turkish-linked vessel damaged since 2022. A war-risk calculus that in July attached to tankers at the CPC moorings now attaches, on this reading, to anything that sails for Novorossiysk.
That calculus lands on Kazakhstan in one specific place. When the energy ministry set out the terminal’s recovery on 1 August, intake at 100,000 tonnes a day against June’s average of 286,600, it tied further growth to “timely vessel positioning”. Charterers refused Novorossiysk calls once already, after the 22 July strikes. Every hull that burns within sight of the port makes the next one costlier to position.
Neither the consortium nor KazMunayGas has spoken in its own name since CPC’s morning statement of 30 July; nothing further surfaced in this morning’s sweep of the operator’s usual mirrors. The July loading total, the first hard number on what the attacks cost, has not yet appeared.