By Galina Korol | 2026-07-24

Russia's oil tankers are drifting through the Sea of Azov as ghosts. Ukrainian drones have knocked them out and left them where they sit, crews gone and cargo trapped aboard.

The choice is deliberate. Ukraine's drones skip the massive supertankers and hunt the small vessels instead. Those small tankers keep Russia's entire oil export chain running, and disabling them freezes the whole system.

Overnight on July 14, Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces struck 11 more vessels in the Sea of Azov under Operation "MoLoCHKa," an acronym that translates to "Moscow will fall through Crimea." The targets included five tankers, five cargo ships and a tugboat. Robert Brovdi, the commander known as "Madyar," announced the strikes on his Telegram channel. He said drones disabled 116 vessels in the operation's first nine days, a total that climbs daily.

Why Ukraine hits small ships

The drones leave most tankers afloat by design. Brovdi wrote that many people do not grasp why Ukraine leaves the tankers "to drift as ghosts instead of sinking them."

The Ukrainian military is disabling Russia's feeder fleet, the small tankers that shuttle oil from Azov ports to giant tankers waiting in the Black Sea. Paralyzing that feeder fleet halts the transit of oil through the Volga-Don Canal and the Sea of Azov to the larger tankers, Brovdi said.

Serhiy Misyura, a military correspondent and Armed Forces of Ukraine press officer, explained on Facebook how the chain works. Small river-sea class tankers load oil at refineries in the Volgograd, Samara and Saratov clusters. They sail down the Volga River and the Volga-Don Canal into the Sea of Azov. Deep-draft ocean tankers of around 100,000 tons cannot enter Azov ports, so the smaller vessels carry the oil through the Kerch Strait. Near Port Kavkaz or in the Black Sea, they transfer the cargo to larger ships.

A typical small tanker carries 7,000 tons of oil, Misyura said in a July 11 post. Pumps move up to 1,000 cubic meters an hour, so offloading one vessel takes up to eight hours. Filling one large "Blue" class tanker takes 14 to 15 of the small ones, like the tanker the Security Service of Ukraine seized this week as it loaded oil that way.

The timing mattered. Misyura counted 40 to 50 of these tankers in the Sea of Azov in May. Their numbers surged past 100 in June. Ukraine struck as Russia ramped up the system and the supply chain sat exposed.

Grain shipments pile up

Oil is half the story. Grain makes up the rest, said Kateryna Yaresko, a journalist for the SeaKrime project at the Myrotvorets Center.

Russia ships out its own grain along with grain taken from occupied Ukrainian territories, she told Kontur, and exporting Ukrainian resources is a war crime. These waterways serve as Russia's main export corridors. Bulk carriers now sit at anchor waiting for cargo from Russian and occupied ports. The grain never arrives, because the Volga-Don and Kerch canals are blocked.

The backlog is building on land as well. Hundreds of grain trucks are stranded at ports along the Sea of Azov with nowhere to unload.

"They have amassed there with nowhere to offload their grain, waiting for ships that no longer exist," Viktor Taran, a Kyiv-based defense innovation expert and head of the KruK UAV Operator Training Center, told Kontur.

The bottleneck spreads through the whole network, Taran said. The stranded trucks cannot return to the fields for the harvest, so the crops Russia is gathering are left to rot, another blow to its economy.

Some vessels Ukraine counts as part of the shadow fleet fly foreign flags and are registered to overseas companies. Ukraine still treats them as a Russian shadow fleet because they operate in the interests of the aggressor state and generate revenue that funds the war, Yaresko said. The operation targets any vessel that keeps the system running.

The domino effect

Russian authorities soon began halting their own maritime traffic. On July 10, Russia's Federal Security Service border guards took the unprecedented wartime step of telling shipping companies they would stop accepting transit requests for the Kerch Strait. Militarnyi reported the decision on July 11, citing Reuters.

Every idle day costs a ship thousands of dollars. Crews are demanding to leave these routes. Insurers are rewriting their terms or refusing coverage.

"Insurance premiums will spike, and shipowners are going to face intense negotiations," Yaresko said. The immediate impact is already staggering, she added, something she could not have imagined a short time ago.

The damage could soon reach past shipping. Russia's major refineries are damaged, so exports are one of the few ways left to monetize its crude, said Oleh Bayrak, a columnist for Obozrevatel. If maritime logistics fail, producers will have to cut production.

Bayrak wrote on Facebook on July 9 that more than 1,500 oil wells have been capped over the past five months, a figure Foreign Minister Sybiha named. Russia is running low on gasoline, he said, and could be left without oil if it does not end the war.