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Oil on the beaches, drone attacks, gasoline shortages: Russia’s Black Sea coast is now a perilous place to vacation. So why do Russians keep coming?

Source: Bereg

The summer vacation season on Russia’s Black Sea coast is under threat for the second year running. In 2025, authorities in Anapa banned swimming and sunbathing on local beaches after two tankers carrying fuel oil were wrecked, triggering an environmental disaster along the coastline. In 2026, the restrictions in Anapa were lifted, but tons of petroleum products ended up in the sea again — this time from a Ukrainian drone strike on the Tuapse oil refinery. Reporters from Bereg, an independent journalists’ cooperative, went to Krasnodar Krai to find out how the region is coping with the escalating attacks and the fallout from the environmental disaster. Meduza is publishing their report in full.

Warning: This article contains profanity.

The road to the sea

‘We could have been vacationing in Crimea or the Maldives if it weren’t for Putin’

“Our aircraft has landed at Mineralnye Vody Airport,” the captain’s voice crackles over the intercom. “We are currently awaiting clearance to depart for Sochi.”

For the Bereg correspondent, Sochi is only a transit point — it’s the only way to reach Tuapse, which has no airport of its own.

The airspace over Sochi has been temporarily closed because of either a drone threat or a missile threat. Hardly any of the passengers seem surprised: in recent months, Russian airports — especially in the country’s south — have been shutting down nearly every day.

No one is asked to deplane yet; there’s hope the plane will soon be cleared to leave. About half an hour later, everyone’s phones buzz at once — the airline has sent notifications that the departure is delayed by at least another half hour. Passengers are directed to the waiting area.

Near the gate, an airport employee is already standing by with a stack of 150-ruble vouchers redeemable for water at the terminal cafes. But before claiming them, people rush to grab spots near power outlets to charge their phones. A line for water forms at the nearest bar.

“We could already be sitting on a beach in Sochi,” grumbles a curly-haired girl of about 15, struggling to fit her charger into an outlet.

“We could have been vacationing in Crimea or the Maldives if it weren’t for Putin!” a red-haired girl her age with pink bangs replies — remarkably loudly for such a statement. “Couldn’t they have had me in a normal country?”

The half-empty airport gradually fills as several more Sochi-bound flights are forced to land at Mineralnye Vody.

“If you fly in the morning or at night, you run a high risk of this crap! During the day, though, it’s all smooth sailing,” a dark-haired passenger says, for some reason scolding his companion.

“Yeah, we should have made it,” she replies apologetically.

From their conversation, it becomes clear that the couple was supposed to fly from Moscow to Sochi several hours earlier but missed their flight and bought tickets for the next one. The first plane landed in Sochi without incident.

The airline keeps sending texts about further delays — another hour and a half, then again and again. Passengers on the delayed flights are handed 800-ruble meal vouchers. People are pleased, but it soon turns out that getting a proper dinner for that amount is nearly impossible: the cafe kitchen can’t keep up with the crowd, and orders take about an hour.

‘I will remember this flight for the rest of my life’

Just before dawn, the airspace over Sochi finally opens, and passengers from one of the delayed flights are invited to board. The others watch enviously as the first plane climbs into the sky. Almost immediately, the Sochi airport closes again, and the plane turns back to Mineralnye Vody. It was just a few minutes from its destination.

By midday, the restrictions are lifted again. Airport staff urge passengers to hurry: the airspace could close at any moment. People settle into their seats and exhale in relief. Then the captain announces that air traffic control has once again denied clearance for departure.

Those willing to wait out the closure will be put up in a hotel in Mineralnye Vody. The alternatives are trains and buses. Passengers think wistfully of the man who decided against flying to Sochi after the very first closure.

“I will remember this flight for the rest of my life,” a young man in a straw hat says with a nervous smile, shaking his head as he makes his way toward the exit.

“They ‘liberated’ Crimea, for fuck’s sake!” a tanned man mutters under his breath as he comes down the boarding stairs.

A woman in a hijab holding an infant is in tears, exhausted and afraid of being left alone in a strange city. Other passengers comfort her, assuring her that the airline won’t abandon anyone and will get everyone to Sochi as soon as it can.

Outside the terminal, taxi drivers swarm the passengers, offering rides to Sochi for 25,000 rubles. The drive is 550 kilometers (about 340 miles), partly along a mountain switchback road, and drivers estimate about 10 hours of travel time.

“You headed to Sochi too?” one of the drivers calls out to a couple smoking nearby.

“Almost everyone here is.”

“Split it [with someone else], and it’ll be cheaper! It’s 15,000 each — and off we go.”

“You said 25,000 total, and now it’s 30,” the man replies, puzzled by the driver’s math.

“Well, what do you expect? That’s how it works when I’m carrying more than one,” the driver says defensively.

The passengers wave him off: too expensive — Yandex Taxi is cheaper, at 15,000 rubles.

Almost all the passengers from the delayed flight decide to go to the hotel provided by the airline. Five hours later, everyone is brought back to the airport: the airspace over Sochi is open. This time, people don’t even make it to the plane — news of yet another closure reaches them in the shuttle.

Nerves are fraying. A tall red-haired young man breaks down. “I haven’t been able to fly out for a whole day!” he sobs.

A crowd surrounds one of the airport employees: some want to know when they’ll be fed again, others how to retrieve their luggage, still others whether they can fly back to Moscow at the airline’s expense.

“I’m sick of it — back and forth, back and forth,” one passenger says, voicing the general mood.

“Just hang on a little longer,” the employee pleads. “Everyone’s checked their bags, so as soon as they say Sochi is open, you’ll be on your way.”

“I don’t have the strength to keep waiting.”

The waiting area empties fairly quickly — within a day, only about half the passengers from the diverted flights remain.

People are handed meal vouchers again, this time two apiece. “There aren’t many of you left, so I can spare them,” the airport employee explains with a smile. Passengers soon discover that the vouchers can’t be used for alcohol and their values can’t be combined — meaning anyone ordering a dish over 800 rubles pays the difference out of pocket.

The public address system calls passengers to board once again. People run toward the gates with food containers in hand, eating on the go.

“Are we actually going to fly this time?” a woman of about 60 asks, hopeful and anxious, as she boards the shuttle. “I wanted so badly to see the sea, but it’s frightening.”

She adds that if she’d known beforehand what conditions were like in the Kuban, she would have chosen somewhere else. In a panic, she had already canceled her Sochi hotel reservation, then changed her mind: “I’m only going for three days. But if there are explosions, I’ll leave immediately.”

A drunken group of passengers piles into the shuttle. A day earlier, these people were strangers; the hours spent waiting for a flight have made them friends. One of the women, laughing, pulls paper cups from a plastic bag. The tall, lanky man beside her produces a one-liter bottle of whiskey and a two-liter bottle of cola. He mixes cocktails and passes the cups around to his group. Airport employees look on with awkward smiles.

The new friends explain that they were at a supermarket when someone called to say the flight might actually happen. “Can you believe it — they even let us into the airport with the whiskey,” the woman boasts. “They said to bring whatever you want, just fly. So the whole plane can get wasted!”

The city drowning in fuel oil

‘Where are we supposed to shelter? The shelters are locked’

Only a couple of people step off the commuter train between Sochi and Tuapse along with the Bereg correspondent, and they’re clearly not tourists — no suitcases, no beach gear.

Tuapse is unwelcoming: the streetlights are out, and there’s no one outside the station except taxi drivers. A drunk couple argues loudly outside a 24-hour store.

The hotel is only 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) away — walking distance. But after more than a day in transit, getting there fast is the priority. The ride-hailing app won’t load: there’s no internet. A VPN service that can bypass “whitelist” restrictions doesn’t help either — the city is under a total internet shutdown.

Taxi drivers are taking advantage. “No internet, huh?” says a short, stocky driver, squinting. “I can take you, but it’s pricey around here.” He wants 500 rubles for the ride — and that really is pricey. Yandex Taxi charges just 150 for the same route, though there’s no way to find that out until you’re on the hotel Wi-Fi.

At the hotel, it’s clear the war has hit daily life in Tuapse hard: notices explaining what to do during a drone attack hang everywhere. Sheets of printer paper with red arrows, posted by the staircase, mark evacuation routes in case of an attack.

Judging by the text beside the arrows, an attack by something called BEKs could also trigger an evacuation. Google explains that the acronym stands for uncrewed surface vessels — “naval drones.”

The receptionist runs through the drill matter-of-factly: if an evacuation is announced, hotel staff will call the room and explain where to go.

“Evacuations don’t happen often, I take it?”

“Depends. There was a stretch when they were announcing one almost every day.”

Through the night and into the next day, the mobile carrier sends a relentless stream of texts announcing and canceling drone and missile alerts. But no sirens sound in the city.

“The beaches keep closing and reopening, but people swim anyway,” a hotel employee says. “There are undeveloped beaches — though they’re not very clean; not everything’s been cleared yet.”

She doesn’t specify what exactly hasn’t been cleared. But guests can figure it out from the notice posted nearby:

Next to the notice sits a basket filled to the brim with orange shoe covers. No one uses them.

Within the city limits are two maintained pebble beaches: Tsentralny (“Central”) and Primorsky (“Seaside”). The first is closed — ostensibly for a cleanup of petroleum products. Several Tuapse residents who spoke with Bereg believe this explanation is just a cover, and that in reality, “military equipment” has been massed on the shoreline “and trenches have been dug there.”

On the cobblestone paths near Tsentralny, black tire marks catch the eye, as if someone had run a paint roller across the pavement. These are the remnants of spilled petroleum products, tracked around by car tires.

Even with Tsentralny closed, Primorsky has few visitors. In the middle of summer, there are no vendors, no beach cafes, no water rides — just a single stand selling sightseeing tours.

At first glance, the beach looks clean: no oil stains on the white boardwalk. Look closer, though, and some of the pebbles are flecked with dark gray. Scrape off the dark residue, warm it between your fingers, and you catch the smell of freshly laid asphalt.

Ironically, a vacationer has left behind a thermos bearing the Rosneft trade union logo. Rosneft owns the local refinery — the target of the attacks that left the city drowning in petroleum products.

Primorsky gives way to an undeveloped stretch of beach that’s noticeably dirtier: bottles, candy wrappers, broken toys, and charcoal from campfires litter the sand. The farther you get from the maintained city beach, the more dark-stained pebbles there are — they jump out at you. Nearby are large smears, as if someone had dumped out a small can of paint. None of it bothers the sunbathers, who lie out next to the oil-smeared rocks.

“What’s here now is actually clean! Before, it was a nightmare,” Polina, in a black bikini, tells Bereg. She has spread her towel almost at the water’s edge. “Though every now and then, I still step in something.”

She holds up her sneakers — the soles are covered in brownish streaks and dark specks. Polina moved to Tuapse several years ago. The absence of tourists and entertainment at the height of summer doesn’t surprise her. “It’s not a resort town,” she says with a shrug.

She says no one cleans the undeveloped beaches, but there are no obvious traces of petroleum products in the water. In the first days after the April strike on the refinery, a rainbow sheen was visible on the sea, but it’s been gone for “at least two weeks now.”

“Swim all you want — the water right now is exactly what it was five years ago,” Polina says, quoting an ecologist acquaintance she spoke with after the disaster. Then she adds a caveat: the water here isn’t very clean in general. Dead dolphins wash ashore regularly — now, as before.

“Right here, onto the beach?”

“They’re everywhere, everywhere! What do you expect, with tankers anchored here all the time?”

Polina points toward a small mound. At first, it looks like a pile of rocks covered in trash; in fact, it’s a dead dolphin. She says it’s been lying there since April.

“What I don’t like about this year is the bla!”

“What?”

“You know — all those flying things.”

“Insects?”

“No — the war, the war!”

No independent assessments of the water quality after the strikes on the Tuapse refinery are publicly available.

According to Polina, the “bla” attacks — that is, drone strikes — sometimes set off sirens in the city, and police chase people off the beaches. Some of her friends were so rattled by the air raid alerts that they stopped going to the beach altogether — partly because the seaport next door could become a target.

Polina herself considers the warning system “pointless”:

Polina is exhausted by the war but doesn’t believe the fighting will end anytime soon. “This is only the beginning,” she says. “The war will go on until the government changes. Well, sooner or later it will. He’s not immortal.”

She rails against the Russian president: “If he hadn’t come to power, he’d have been locked up long ago.” In her view, Putin is “even worse than Stalin”: when Stalin died, his estate amounted to only “a couple of greatcoats and a pair of felt boots,” and his relatives served in the war alongside ordinary Soviet citizens — something Polina believes fostered “real patriotism.” Russians today have none, she’s convinced.

“Send all these leaders’ children to the war — and it’ll be over tomorrow!” she says confidently. “As long as the war stays profitable for them, nothing will change.”

‘The drones are launched from right here’

In the eastern part of the city, missing-person notices for 14-year-old Valeria Bokova appear again and again. She went missing after a drone hit a private home on Sochinskaya Street. The attack came nearly three months ago, on April 16. Other flyers — ads for goods and services — hang in tatters, but these remain untouched.

That day, Tuapse came under a massive Ukrainian drone attack targeting the local oil refinery. The strike sparked a fire at the refinery; 30 residential buildings — private homes and apartment blocks — and several schools were also damaged. That same morning, officials in the Kuban reported that two children had been killed — Valeria Bokova among them.

The Tuapse residents the Bereg correspondent spoke with on the beach and around town, the taxi drivers, the passersby discussing the subject among themselves — all are convinced the girl died in the attack. The Investigative Committee immediately declared Bokova dead and opened a criminal case on terrorism charges.

Nothing remains of the house the drone hit but the scorched ruins of its walls, twisted metal, and a heap of broken furniture and appliances. There are no other traces of the explosion in the surrounding area, and the contrast is unsettling.

Around the refinery, about 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) from the Bokovs’ home, it’s a different story. After April 16, the plant was struck three more times — most recently on May 1. From a distance, you can see the once-white, now-charred oil storage tanks and industrial buildings. A fine speckling of oil covers the cobblestones, curbs, railings, flowerbeds, fences, and shrubs. Here and there are clumps of petroleum products that haven’t yet hardened.

The closer you get to the refinery, the bigger the stains. The transparent roof over a nearby pedestrian walkway is covered in black streaks, as if someone had sprayed it liberally with oil.

A conspiracy theory has taken hold in the city: the strikes on the refinery were staged by its owners. Nearly every Tuapse resident who gets to talking about the plant repeats some version of it. Some believe the owners wanted insurance payouts; others say the plant was hiding a shortfall from its suppliers and trying to dodge penalties. Still others believe Rosneft wanted to drive up gasoline prices: most of the gas stations in Tuapse belong to the company.

Nearly everyone offers the same argument for the theory: “There’s no way drones could fly a thousand kilometers [620 miles] undetected — so they must be launched from right here.”

The refinery sits on the Tuapse River. After the explosion, oil flowed into the river and then downstream to the sea.

The river’s mouth is exactly where Tuapse’s Tsentralny Beach begins.

Missiles over the beach

‘We came knowing about all the possible dangers’

“Sure, drones fly around here — where don’t they?” says Vasily, a taxi driver ferrying the Bereg correspondent from Tuapse to the resort village of Agoy. Locals recommend it, saying the beaches in Agoy are cleaner and better equipped than the city’s.

“It used to be that as soon as an air raid alert started, from midnight on, they’d fire everything they had. And you’d sit there like an idiot on the balcony, smoking, while the drones buzzed past,” the Tuapse native says, recalling the spring. “They couldn’t shoot the drones down fast enough. And the ones they did shoot down — the debris smashed up everything around here.”

What worries the driver more is the fuel crisis. Vasily is sure the shortage is artificial. “What kind of circus is this? What are these lines? An outrage!” he fumes.

We pass several gas stations, each with a line of dozens of cars. Vasily says he tries to fill up before 4 a.m., when there’s still a chance of avoiding a wait.

The road to one of the beaches runs through streets lined with two-story cottages. Many have big banners on their windows and fences: “Rooms available” or “Lodging for rent.” Tourism in Tuapse this year, the driver says, is a disaster.

“No season — well, thank God; at least there’s no traffic.”

“Is the traffic usually bad?”

“A total shitshow! Everyone drives to Sochi.”

But now the road is completely empty. The fuel crisis has likely thinned the ranks of people willing to drive to Sochi.

Vasily stops at a tall metal gate with a small door left ajar. You used to be able to drive right up to the beach; now it’s foot traffic only. The reason becomes clear on the beach itself: military hardware sits lined up alongside a shashlik (kebab) stand and a shooting gallery.

There are even fewer vacationers in Agoy than in Tuapse. But the beach is cleaner, and there’s more to do: besides the usual loungers and umbrellas, there are daybeds with fabric canopies; some bars, cafes, and shops are open; and you can get your hair braided or buy hot corn on the cob.

The military hardware and the drone threat don’t scare the tourists.

Rosa, 60, from Almetyevsk, says that in Tatarstan “that kind of thing happens too” — she’s used to it. She’s happy with her seaside vacation. Eight days in an apartment hotel with no meals cost her 24,000 rubles; her son, his wife, and their child paid 45,000. This summer, she says, the family had badly wanted to go to Crimea but had to change plans.

“You chose Agoy because Crimea isn’t very safe?”

“Why unsafe? It’s just that fuel is a mess there: you can get in, but then you can’t get out.”

Masha, 35, from the Kursk region, came to Agoy with her husband and two children. Like Rosa, she’s been here before. “We’ve come six years in a row — we like it here; it’s calm,” she says. “But we noticed that this year, everything’s thinned out.” Her favorite stalls, where the family bought fruit and sweets every summer, have closed; the shashlik place they liked best isn’t operating; the paddleboats and other water rides are gone.

Masha and her family stay at the same guesthouse every year. It’s usually full; this year, they’re the only guests. With tourists staying away, the owners kept last year’s prices — 4,000 rubles a room.

“We came knowing about all the possible dangers,” she says. “But when you spend the whole year working, keeping house, watching the kids — all that strain… The one outlet is getting to look at [the sea], if only for a week.” Compared to the Kursk region’s border areas, Agoy is calm, Masha says. She lives in a village outside Kursk.

Asked what draws the family to Agoy in particular, Masha says that in 2020, she searched online for Russian beaches with clear blue water — and this stretch of coast was the first result. When she arrived and saw the scenery, she wept at its beauty. She’s been recommending the resort to friends and family ever since.

In the summer of 2022, she came here with her brother. That fall, he was mobilized; by December, he had been killed. “We stay at the same house, eat at the same cafeteria, step out to stand on the terrace the way he did. For me, I think, it’s forever now,” she says. “And this year, I saw that the colors have gone dim. There are fewer places left with a little piece of him.”

‘Don’t be scared — this happens almost every day here’

Khachik, a Tuapse local, has spent the past few years selling baked goods and shashlik on Tuapse’s Tsentralny Beach. This summer, with Tsentralny closed, he decided to relocate temporarily to Agoy, where things are more predictable, and rented a spot. He looks sadly at the empty loungers: “Last year, people were packed shoulder to shoulder.” He hasn’t earned back the rent yet, but he hopes tourists will still turn up before the summer’s out.

A faint air raid siren interrupts the conversation. Tourists look around curiously and spot a police officer in a white short-sleeved shirt saying something into a megaphone — the words are impossible to make out. Vacationers reluctantly get up from their towels and drift back from the waterline toward the beach cafes.

“Drone alert again,” Khachik says. “It gets so tiresome: you can’t rest; we can’t work.”

“Do we need to leave the beach?”

“No, just the water. We can stay here. We’ve got artillery over there,” Khachik says, waving in that direction.

The area in front of his stall fills with people waiting out the alert so they can get back on the beach.

“If they shoot them [the drones] down, it’ll be over the sea. They’re not likely to let anything near the shore,” says a blond tourist in a floral sarong.

“That’s still close,” Khachik replies.

A young man in a red T-shirt walks up to the stall; he works as a beach lifeguard and collects the lounger fees. Ordering tourists off the beach during an air raid alert isn’t part of his job. He says the order can be ignored anyway — there’s no penalty. Indeed, the people sunbathing on the undeveloped beach next door haven’t budged. Working on the beach during attacks is “sometimes a bit scary,” he says, but on the whole, he’s used to it.

A volley shakes the beach, with a crackle like fireworks, only several times louder. Directly overhead, trailing gray smoke, a burning missile streaks past. It moves toward Novorossiysk, almost parallel to the shoreline, at about the height of a three-story building. Being on the beach becomes frightening. More frightening still: no one gathered here is scared — or even surprised.

“Don’t be scared, don’t be scared — this happens almost every day here,” Khachik says in a soothing voice. Then, with relish: “Now there’ll be a sound!” About 30 seconds later, a dull thud rolls in.

“There — [the air defense round] just hit!” Khachik says with satisfaction.

The Tuapse locals gathered on the beach seem to treat the fighting like an immersive theater performance or a video game brought to life.

“Have you ever thought about leaving?”

“No, this is our homeland,” Khachik replies.

“It’s home. You don’t run from home,” the lifeguard agrees.

“Honestly, I’m a military pensioner,” Khachik says, explaining his calm. “I served 20 years in the Russian army, starting in 1993: Chechnya, Dagestan, Abkhazia. So I’m used to it. But ordinary people don’t know any of this. Anyway, that’s it for today — they’re done shooting. The next round might not come for another three days.”

Khachik would like the war to end soon. But he doesn’t regret that it started. He believes the propaganda: if Russia hadn’t invaded Ukraine, he’s convinced, NATO countries would have attacked Moscow within a couple of years. “[Putin] sort of put the brakes on them, but something still isn’t working out,” he says with annoyance.

* * *

At the Tuapse train station, a tall teenager of about 15 waits for a train with his grandfather.

“I wonder how many times the air defenses have fired this summer. Fifteen or so?” the boy asks, turning to his grandfather.

“Come on, knock it off,” the grandfather says, waving him off.

It’s clear from their conversation that the grandson has come from a city where missiles don’t normally fly overhead. He eagerly describes his impressions of the past few weeks — the account sounds like a review of an entertainment show.

After the fuel oil spill

‘The Panterovtsy needed to be pushed back’

Several dozen people who have just stepped off a train in Anapa run after a departing minibus, waving their free hands to catch the driver’s attention.

Long before the fuel crisis, Anapa was already struggling with a public transit shortage — there simply aren’t enough buses, and the wait at the station for a minibus can run a couple of hours.

Taxis used to save the day, locals say. But with the gasoline shortage, there aren’t enough of those now either. The Yandex Taxi app flashes a warning: “You are 26th in line, high demand.” The only fallback is unlicensed cabbies who have jacked up their prices.

“Drivers either don’t come in [for their shifts] at all or spend the day in line at the pump,” one such driver says. Like his colleague from Agoy, he’s convinced the crisis broke out not because of the strikes on Russian refineries but because gas station owners artificially inflated prices. “Putin said there’s gasoline!” he insists.

The driver is of two minds about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On the one hand, he thinks “the Panterovtsy, or whatever they’re called” — apparently a garbled version of “Banderites,” Russian propaganda’s term for Ukrainian nationalists — needed to be pushed back; on the other, he’s against “a fratricidal war.” But what he laments most is that the war has taken too many “Russian guys”: “For every 10 girls, there’s maybe one guy left, if that. Who are they supposed to marry?”

By 8 a.m., Anapa’s Tsentralny Beach is already packed. Barkers tout rides on the “banana-hooligan” and the “bouncy doughnut,” while vendors with big buckets hawk boiled crayfish and shrimp.

Last summer, swimming and sunbathing were banned along the entire Anapa coastline: the December 15, 2024, wreck of two Russian fuel oil tankers had sent thousands of tons of petroleum products into the water and onto the beaches, and the damage could not be repaired before the season began.

By June 2026, nearly all the local beaches had been declared safe for recreation. The sand looks dirtier than a year ago — there’s a lot of scattered household trash — but fuel oil is hard to spot; only a couple of blotches turn up. There’s no smell of oil by the water.

Along with the litter, the waves wash seaweed onto the shore; in some stretches, it blankets the entire surf zone.

“Look how shaggy it is!” A boy in swim goggles pokes the seaweed with a stick.

“It stinks!” His friend pinches his nose shut.

“Let’s get out of here.”

A short distance away, four adults and three children shelter in the shade of an awning.

“Please move down a bit farther — the loungers and the canopy are for hotel guests only,” a young man in a light panama hat says politely, leaning toward the group.

“It reeks of seaweed over there!” a tourist in a turquoise swimsuit replies.

“Go a little farther and there won’t be any seaweed. Besides, it’s good for you. Full of iodine and potassium.”

Farther along the shoreline, toward Dzhemete and Vityazevo, the seaweed does disappear, but an unpleasant sewage smell takes over. It comes from the Anapka River, which empties into the Black Sea right where Tsentralny Beach ends. The river’s water is a deep brown, and it stains the sea the same color. Children and adults alike splash in the murky waves.

Underfoot, the sand feels like concrete — it’s packed down that hard. Children building sandcastles struggle to dig out “moats” around their creations with their fingers.

Anapa’s calling card has always been its beaches: they formed several thousand years ago from quartz sand mixed with crushed seashells. Scientists say the material took shape here before human civilization emerged — it wasn’t trucked in from elsewhere, as at many other resorts.

After the wreck of two oil tankers washed tons of fuel oil ashore, there were attempts to clean the beaches. But the petroleum products never came out entirely. To solve the problem, workers hauled away nearly all of Anapa’s sand and poured new sand in its place. It looks like construction fill, flecked with clay and stones.

As a result, the dunes separating the beach from the city and the thin strip along the surf line stayed gray-pink, while the main stretch of beach turned yellow-orange.

Only after the sand was replaced did authorities declare the beaches safe for recreation.

‘The man needs to practice shooting at missiles’

Right after the fuel oil spill, in the summer of 2025, the beach at the village of Bolshoy Utrish was considered one of the cleanest on the coast. Swimming there was banned all the same.

Unlike Anapa’s beaches, this one is pebbly, so the water looks cleaner. Small spots of fuel oil dot the rocks here and there.

A man of about 35 with a large cross around his neck peers through binoculars at a lighthouse on a tiny island just offshore.

“Dad, show me the gun!” A fair-haired boy of about five reaches for the binoculars. He means the military hardware next to the lighthouse.

His mother watches them with a fond smile — she’s eight months pregnant. The whole family — parents and two sons — came to the village from Krasnodar.

A missile alert siren sounds from a loudspeaker mounted behind the beach, but no one leaves. There are no megaphone-wielding officials here, as there were in Agoy.

A few minutes later comes a loud volley: a missile flies from the direction of the lighthouse toward Anapa, trailing a ribbon of pale smoke. The adults barely react. The children start to cry.

“Mom, what are they shooting at?”

“It’s nothing — the man is just practicing. They have to practice shooting at missiles somehow.”

“But why at the sea?”

The parents have no answer.

Not far from the family, two friends of about 40 sunbathe in black one-piece swimsuits and big sunglasses, each holding a glass of wine. They’re discussing the air defenses — and the government whose decisions sent missiles flying over the beach.

“My whole life flashed before my eyes — I thought I’d die of fright,” one says of the missile launch.

“Oh no, not me — I still have a lot of plans,” the other replies. “I want to live to see Putin die.”

‘They said they brought in good sand. It’s clay and dust’

In the resort village of Vityazevo, the road to the sea runs through the Paralia, a pedestrian strip about 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) long. It’s packed with cafes, shops, ice cream stands, and attractions like fish pedicures and photo ops with macaws.

Vityazevo lies about 15 kilometers (9 miles) from Anapa and is home to most of the Anapa district’s expensive hotels. The beaches by the hotels are looked after, and the sand here is also new — and softer, likely thanks to the tractors with sifting attachments parked nearby.

At the water’s edge stands an elderly man in black swim trunks, hands on hips, looking displeased. A boy of about five whimpers beside him. A woman in a one-piece swimsuit fusses over them both, closely inspecting the child’s legs.

“There’s nothing there!” the man says impatiently.

“No — no more swimming today! Maybe the sea will be cleaner tomorrow. For now, we’ll lie in the sun.”

What spooked this family wasn’t fuel oil. It was jellyfish.

Traces of petroleum products on this shore are few, but they’re there. A black stone may turn out to be a streak of oil or a glob of fuel oil.

An amateur quadcopter hovers over the beach — an unusual sight in wartime Russia. It’s filming children at a summer camp celebrating a Holi-style festival of colors: on the host’s cue, they fling packets of pigment into the air, and everything around them turns different colors.

The children’s shouts are suddenly drowned out by a roar: a fighter jet appears over the sea, passes over the beach, and vanishes beyond the horizon.

Not far away in Vityazevo is Anapa International Airport, named after the aviator Vladimir Kokkinaki — a joint-use airfield serving both civilian and military aviation. It closed to passenger flights after the full-scale invasion began. Over the next hour and a half, two more military aircraft pass over the beach.

Two tourists from the Moscow region tell the Bereg correspondent that air raid sirens have sounded on the beach constantly for the past few days. Those they’ve gotten used to. The ruined beaches are another matter.

The women talk over each other, listing the failings: “The sand is like it’s mixed with construction debris! Look at this — it’s just dust! They said they brought in good sand, but it’s clay. It beats up your heels and leaves rust-colored stains on your beach blanket.”

Next year, if Crimea “stops being so unsettled,” the friends will go there. If not, they’ll come back to Anapa. “Nothing can keep us from a sandy beach!” one of them says with a laugh.

At sunset, vacationers come out to stroll along the water.

“Let’s go back!” a blonde tourist all but shouts.

“Come on, knock it off!” her companion replies.

“What do you mean, knock it off? There’s a dead dolphin over there!”

On the sand lies a mangled dolphin, its tail and fins smeared with fuel oil.

Hunting for fuel

‘Maybe they’ll bring gasoline tomorrow afternoon’

During the night, a powerful boom shakes Vityazevo — as if something enormous had fallen or a car had slammed into a wall at high speed.

“That happens sometimes now, in different places,” says the receptionist at the Bereg correspondent’s hotel, smiling cryptically. At breakfast, guests discuss the attacks in hushed tones. “Yeah, that obviously wasn’t a brick falling,” a young man with a cup of coffee murmurs to his companion.

Russia’s Defense Ministry reported that air defenses shot down drones that night, including over Krasnodar Krai. But neither the regional authorities nor the city administration said anything about an attack on Anapa.

Around midday, mobile internet cuts out in Anapa and Vityazevo, and a siren sounds in the streets. Some 10 minutes later, it’s switched off; no explosions or rumbling can be heard.

Without mobile internet, the GdeBENZ website — launched to track gasoline supplies and lines at the pumps — won’t load. To figure out what’s happening with fuel in the region, you have to pick gas stations at random.

The station nearest the hotel has no line. At the entrance, an employee stops the correspondent’s car: “Only diesel left. Maybe they’ll bring gasoline tomorrow afternoon.”

The next stop is a Lukoil station in the village of Vinogradny, one of the closest to the Crimean Bridge. The line runs two rows deep — about 50 cars, more than half with Crimean or Sevastopol license plates. People fight the heat with open windows. Almost no one runs the air conditioning: they’re saving gas.

“They’ve only got 92-octane here — 20 liters [about 5 gallons] per customer, no filling jerrycans,” a gray-haired man in a blue polo shirt grumbles. He drove in from Crimea; his trunk is crammed with empty jerrycans. He’s in no rush to leave the line — he wants at least to fill his tank. Not that it will help much: the entire allowance will burn up on the drive home.

Every so often, cars cut across the grass to the pumps, bypassing the line. People in line move to block them — then, after a brief exchange, let them through: drivers who want diesel don’t have to wait.

Getting from the back of the line to the front takes just 20 minutes.

“People must ask you to fill jerrycans all the time?”

“Constantly,” the attendant says, rolling her eyes.

“And if someone offered you a colorful little banknote?”

“Even for a banknote,” she says, laughing. “Ten thousand, 20,000 — you name it, they’ve offered.”

“Their only option is to loop around and fill up again,” another attendant chimes in. “A lot of them have big tanks.”

On the way back toward Anapa, there’s a Rosneft station with a line of about 40 cars. A little past it, half-hidden in the bushes, sits a passenger car with Sevastopol plates.

A translucent tube snakes out from under the back seat, through the open passenger door, and into a jerrycan on the ground. Several more empty containers stand nearby. Once the driver fills them, he’ll head back to a gas station for more.

Outside one of the Gazprom stations in Anapa, more than 100 cars are lined up for gasoline. Those around the middle of the line have been waiting an hour and a half — and still don’t know what fuel the station has. “Whatever they’ve got, I’ll take it,” says a tanned, curly-haired man.

This station has it all: diesel and gasoline from 92 to 100 octane. “Thirty liters [about 8 gallons], no jerrycans, one fill-up only,” an employee instructs sternly. But here, as at the other stations, no one writes down license plates.

At a Rosneft station in town, the fuel is gone by 4 p.m. The attendants say the tanker truck won’t come until 8 p.m. But the drivers keep vigil anyway: they hold spots in line for themselves and their relatives and watch to make sure no one cuts in. “You can’t park here — my husband’s coming soon,” a woman in athletic shorts says, blocking the way to a parking spot.

Waiting for gasoline, the drivers get to talking; several dozen people stand around the station. The first ones in line have already drawn up a list to make sure no one gets fuel out of turn.

The list was the idea of Ira, a fair-haired woman who looks to be about 35. She didn’t just record the order — she also assigned people to pumps according to the fuel each needed.

“Maybe you should start charging for this?” Ksenia says with a laugh. Both women came to Anapa from the village of Sukko, and this is the second time they’ve run into each other at this station — it’s how they met. Ksenia is number 31 in line.

“I skipped work today,” she says. “Put everything off. All of it — just to fill up.”

* * *

On the correspondent’s last night in Anapa, the city is restless again: something booms several times in the sky, setting off a chorus of car alarms. Life goes on all the same. If anything, there seem to be more vacationers out on the streets than during the day: people are out having fun — dancing to songs by Anna Asti and the band Zveri and shooting at balloons in a shooting gallery, hoping to win stuffed animals.

Suddenly, the sky lights up with hundreds of colored sparks: someone on the beach has set off fireworks. Every burst makes you flinch.