By By Sherry Su
A Russian court order to halt oil loadings (click here) from a port in the Black Sea has unnerved European crude traders already reeling from the tightest regional market in years, sending prices for competing barrels spiraling.
On Tuesday, a Russian court ordered a 30-day stoppage of the CPC Terminal, through which more than 30 million barrels of mostly Kazakh crude gets exported each month. It said the halt is because the facility violated its oil-spill prevention plan.
If it comes to pass, the stoppage would be another blow to a European oil market that’s lost large amounts of supply to unrest in Libya, and seen sharply reduced shipments from elsewhere. For now the terminal is running as normal....
A Russian missile (click here) has hit a tanker that has been drifting in the Black Sea for over four months and had been carrying diesel, the Interfax-Ukraine news agency reported on Thursday, citing Ukraine’s military which called the ship an “ecological bomb.”
The Moldova-flagged tanker Millennial Spirit has now been struck twice since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.
It was first hit with a missile fired from a warship days after the invasion. Moldova said at the time that the ship had a Russian crew and two were seriously wounded.
Ukraine’s southern military command said when the vessel was struck in February it had more than 500 tonnes of diesel on board and that since then it had been drifting without a crew.
“Probably the remainder of the cargo is burning,” the military said in a statement cited by Interfax-Ukraine saying the tanker had been hit for a second time.
It called the vessel a “delayed-action ecological bomb” and blamed the fact it was drifting without a crew on a Russian blockade of Ukrainian ports. It said a Russian Kh-31 air-to-surface missile had struck the ship....
