Tehran said on 25 July that a Ukrainian strike had hit an Iranian commercial vessel in the Caspian, and that the explosion killed one sailor and injured another. Ukraine’s representative was summoned. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told the EU’s Kaja Kallas, in a call reported on 26 July, that the UN Security Council, the EU and the international community should respond decisively.
Volodymyr Zelensky praised the results of "long-range strikes" in the Caspian in a social media post, alluding to vessels carrying military cargo, Reuters reported. He did not identify the nationality of the targets.
Loading at the CPC terminal has been down since the attacks of 20 July, and the consortium has stopped taking Kazakh crude. Output fell 21% on 22 July, to 1.63 million barrels a day from a July average of 2.07 million. Tengiz dropped 56%, from an average 925,000 barrels a day to about 406,000. The oil analyst Olzhas Baidildinov puts the cost at $32 million a day.
The detour under discussion runs east across the water: Aktau to Baku, then Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan. That route carried 1.3 million tonnes of Kazakh crude in the whole of 2025. CPC moved 70.5 million tonnes in the same year, roughly 63 million of it Kazakh.
1.3 million tonnes is about a week of what CPC carried for Kazakhstan last year.
Interfax-Kazakhstan reported on Monday that flows through Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan fell 9% in the first half, with transit down 4%. The route now being asked to carry more was moving less through the first half of the year.
Through this war the Caspian has sat outside the shooting, and the Aktau plan rests on that. A hit hull changes the insurance question before it changes the volume question, and insurance decides whether a charterer sails. Charterers refusing to enter CPC water is part of how the Black Sea route closed this month, which this desk reported on 22 July.