Between 5 and 15 October, nine merchant ships were hit or targeted off Romania and Bulgaria and at Izmail, Ukraine’s port on the Danube. Three sank. Nobody has claimed the attacks, but Russia is the suspected attacker.
Mariel shows what these ships had in common. Five of them, between them, were inspected 31 times in Ukrainian ports since the 2022 invasion, and not once in a Russian port. Two of the ships that sank had shared a manager in Beirut. One, the HS Dignity, was inspected on the Danube five weeks before she went down.
On the other side of the sea, Ukraine has been striking tankers that carry Russian oil. The film follows three of them, off Novorossiysk and Sochi, from August to October.
It is built from Mariel, Maritime Watch’s shadow-fleet database, and from publicly available records.
Music: Yevhen Astafiev, Turning Pages and AlexGrohl. Sound effects: Dragon Studio, David Dumais Audio, SoundReality and Freesound Community, via Pixabay.