Fresh oil started pouring from a stricken Russian tanker in the Black Sea on Friday, said officials in Moscow, as Ukraine warned of "terrible environmental consequences" from the spill. By trying to "conceal the terrible environmental consequences" Moscow had left the entire Black Sea region vulnerable to the fallout,

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that more needed to be done to clean up an oil spill in the Black Sea, saying efforts so far appeared to have been insufficient to deal with the ecological disaster.

The oil spill in the Black Sea that has hit Russian and Crimean coasts since mid-December is particularly hard to clean up because it involves a "heavy" fuel that is less likely to float.

More than 10,000 people have been working to shovel up viscous, foul-smelling fuel oil from sandy beaches in and around Anapa, a popular summer resort. Environmental groups have reported deaths of dolphins,

Mikhail Razvozhaev, the Russia-installed governor of the city of Sevastopol, said new traces of minor pollution required urgent elimination and declared a state of emergency in the city - giving authorities more power to take swift decisions such as ordering citizens to evacuate their homes.

Russian rescue workers have cleared more than 86,000 metric tons of contaminated sand and earth on either side of the Kerch Strait following an oil spill in the Black Sea last month, the emergencies ministry said on Saturday (Jan 4).

The Black Sea is home to different cetacean species — some endangered — and it was the site of an oil spill in the middle of December that killed 31 of them.

This disaster caused a significant spill of heavy fuel oil, devastating marine life in the region, according to Digi24. The spill occurred in the strait, which links the Azov Sea