#blacksea
First ship with humanitarian wheat shipment in 2024 leaves Ukraine
The Sky Gate bulk carrier is shipping 25,000 metric tons of wheat to #Nigeria.
The vessel is moving through the temporary #BlackSea corridor. The #shipping route was opened in August 2023, weeks after Russia's unilateral termination of the Black Sea grain deal threatened Ukraine's ability to ship out its grain.
https://kyivindependent.com/first-ship-with-humanitarian-wheat-in-2024-leaves-ukraine/
#RussianAggression #RussiaInvadedUkraine #grain #exports #StandWithUkraine
Russian missile ship sunk off occupied Crimea
Ukraine's military intelligence (HUR) said on Feb. 1 that its operatives sunk a Russian #Tarantul-class Ivanovets missile corvette from the Black Sea Fleet overnight off of occupied #Crimea.
Ukraine's military intelligence released a video of a naval drone approaching a ship and an ensuing explosion.
The accompanying message said that the #Ivanovets received "direct hits to its hull" and was irreparably damaged. The Ivanovets #sunk afterward, the military intelligence said.
https://kyivindependent.com/military-intelligence-russian-missile-ship-sunk-off-occupied-crimea/
#RussiaInvadedUkraine #BlackSea #drones #Navy #StandWithUkraine
Russia lied about ship inspection in Black Sea
Note: The image displayed is independent from this article. The map image shows the track of the cargo ship during and after the alleged event. The speed of the Sukru Okan remained between 7.2 and 9.8 knots during the displayed track. The track will be available for a few days after which it will only be available to those with a paid account at #MarineTraffic Ref: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:29.8/centery:44.7/zoom:9
InformNapalm, a Ukrainian open-source intelligence outfit, reported on Aug. 13 that the Russian authorities had lied about a Russian ship firing warning shots in the Black Sea earlier on the same day.
The Russian Defense Ministry reported on Aug. 13 that Vasily Bykov, a Russian patrol boat, had fired warning shots after the captain of the Palau-flagged cargo ship #SukruOkan failed to respond to a request to inspect the vessel.
According to InformNapalm, the ministry also lied about the successful inspection of the vessel.
“Sukru Okan did not comply with the demand to stop, but temporarily changed its course in the direction of Turkish territorial waters,” the report reads. “There was no helicopter and no warning shots either. There were only threats from the Russians over the radio.”
#RussiaInvadedUkraine #BlackSea #RussianPropaganda #InformationWarfare #blockade #GrainExport #lies #propaganda #Ukraine #StandWithUkraine
I am currently reading Neal Ascherson's The Black Sea: Coasts and Conquests from Pericles to Putin. It is very interesting. Ascherson's wide knowledge of the history of the Black Sea region is embedded in a wider reading of the history of western and general human thinking.
I have been particularly struck recently by his description in chapter two of western dualism and its ancient Greek roots. He wrote:
The Greek tragedians, when they had invented the barbarians [as a label for "ignorant" and "uncivilised" non-Greeks] , soon began to paly with the 'inner barbarism' of Greeks. Perhaps the part of the otherness f barbarians was that, unlike the civilised, they were morally all of a piece -- not dualistic characters in which a good nature warred with bad, but whole. The 'Hippocratic' authors - the unknown writers of the Greek medical treatises wrongly attributed to the physician Hippocarates - asserted in *Airs, Waters, Places that Scythians and all 'Asians' resembled one another physically, while 'Europeans' (meaning essentially Greeks) differed sharply in size and appearance from one city to another. Barbarians were homogeneous; civilized people were multiform and differentiated. The Greek tragedians thought this might be true about minds as well as bodies. If it was, they were not sure that the contrast between Greek and barbarian psychology - the first complex and inhibited, the second supposed to be spontaneous and natural - was altogether complimentary to the Greeks.
Ascherson identifies this movement in Greek thinking as the root of Europe's long, unfinished ballad of yearning for noble savages, for hunter-gatherers in touch with themselves and the ecology, for cowboys, cattle-reivers, gypsies and Cossacks, for Bedouin nomads and aboriginals walking their song-lines through the unspoiled wilderness.
He adds much detail to this thinking. Tying romantic myths about Scots with equally romantic myths about Russians of the Black Sea region.
I recognised in myself strains of the thinking he described. As I grew up I was enamoured of the back woods life and people of Canada and the USA. T.E. Lawrence's connection with the Arabs was tinged for me with the glow of the ideas of the desert in its awful emptiness and the people who could survive in it. I recall in the film Lawrence of Arabia an Arab prince saying to Lawrence that he (Lawrence) shared the European romantic view of the desert which, as an Arab, the prince regarded with distaste and fear - the desert to be endured not enjoyed. That simple statement by an Arab - albeit an actor in a film - made me question my own relationship with the romantic myths of my culture that I had imbibed since birth.
I don't know what I wanted to achieve by writing this here, except to urge other people to read Ascherson's book. It has relevance to our present lives, and the reference to Putin in the title is utterly intentional, I find it relevant to current events in Ukraine and Russia. In the chapter that I've referenced above he strives to make clear that all humans are ... human which is a message he sends to those who would re-enact the excesses of humans' history towards one another.
More than 5,000 dolphins die in Black Sea as a result of Russia’s war
Russia's war in Ukraine is not only killing civilians but defenceless animals as well.
Marine biologists and ecologists from countries in the Black Sea region are sounding the alarm, as dolphins die en masse for the fourth month in a row.
Ivan Rusev, an environmental scientist at Ukraine's Tuzly Estuaries National Nature Park, estimates at least 5,000 dolphins have died in the Black Sea between March and July.
This number is three times higher compared to pre-war figures, according to Rusev.
#environment #BlackSea #dolphins #ecology #war #RussiaInvadedUkraine #RussiaUkraineWar #marine #wildlife #oceans #
