Baltic Exchange quotes it for 135,000 tonne shipments, and it has risen 140% since the strikes resumed in early July. Insurers have roughly doubled war risk premiums in the zone.
Freight is the visible half. TotalEnergies bought 90,000 tonnes of CPC Blend from Gunvor for late August and early September delivery at $4.60 a barrel under Dated Brent, the weakest differential since January 2025. Shipments of the blend are set to fall by a third this month against the original plan.
Whoever sells that blend absorbs both numbers, and Kazakhstan's producers are in that set. The Caspian Pipeline Consortium carried 64.8 million tonnes of the country's 78.7 million tonnes of crude exports in 2025.
That undertaking is real and it is narrow. The Financial Times reported on Wednesday that Vice President JD Vance asked Volodymyr Zelensky on a 31 July call to stop striking the Kazakh export route, and that Ukraine undertook not to target consortium infrastructure or non-Russian vessels, unless those vessels are under Ukrainian sanctions or carrying Russian cargo. A US administration official confirmed the warning.
One piece of evidence that the undertaking is being observed came on Wednesday from the attacker. The Ukrainian General Staff itemised what it had hit at Novorossiysk: air defence, the tunnel portal of the Grushovaya depot serving the Sheskharis terminal, the infrastructure of several berths, and four warships. The consortium's marine terminal at Yuzhnaya Ozereyevka is absent from that list.
That is one negative, from one side. Transneft has said nothing in its own name about Sheskharis, and no independent observation of either oil facility exists. Two outlets read thermal anomalies off satellite data last week and drew opposite conclusions from the same pixels. Both remain inferences.
Washington's undertaking with Kyiv, three weeks old, covers the pipe and the terminal. The price is set somewhere else.
CPC itself has published nothing since 30 July. Its last statement, on the Telegram channel that has been the only working route to its own words while cpc.ru has failed to resolve for four cycles, described a drone striking the tanker Nissos Sifnos as she loaded at the marine terminal, and a second tanker, Marathi, attacked in territorial waters. No loading figure has followed, no July tonnage, and no word on the American arrangement.
Astana has not commented either. The energy ministry's newsroom did not render for us and Akorda returned a server error, so the negative is partial. What Kazakh outlets carried on Wednesday was recycled: the foreign ministry's 19 July line calling the tanker attacks an inadmissible encroachment on the country's economic interests, and the energy ministry's 31 July statement that full shutdown scenarios are not under consideration.
One object in all this can be watched. Ship-tracking data puts the tanker Aegean Dream's last position at 12:16 UTC on 10 August, roughly 50 nautical miles north-east of the Bosphorus exit, under way at 11.9 knots on a course of 71 degrees, drawing 9 metres, flagged out of coverage at that report. By 05:00 UTC this morning that is 64.7 hours.
Two trackers give her destination as the consortium's terminal. Three give three different arrival times, every one of them elapsed. One of them also renders a current port of Novorossiysk, which is dead reckoning off a dead record and is not carried here. The transponder has stopped. Nothing follows from that about the ship.
How she got there is the part that matters. On 9 August she was one of two vessels to transit the straits after Turkey resumed issuing permits, having waited since the Thursday. The Coastal Safety Directorate had spent several days telling ships bound for Russian and Ukrainian ports that it was not issuing transit permits, and it gave no reason then or since.
Hakan Fidan put Ankara's own proposal on the record on 8 August: a mechanism for declaring a moratorium in the Black Sea, conveyed to both sides. Turkey is waiting for Moscow's reply.
KazMunayGas has been plain about the arithmetic. Askhat Khassenov said on 7 August that there is no alternative to the consortium today on economics or on volume, which does not stop the company working on others. The two he named, the Kazakhstan to China line and Atyrau to Aktau onward through Azerbaijan, are both at feasibility stage. Baku has signalled it could take 2.2 million tonnes a year. CPC moved about 70.5 million tonnes in 2025 and forecasts 72 million for 2026.
The undertaking is three weeks old, conditional and revocable. The rate resets every day.