According to the Russian Ministry of Transport, the Liberia-flagged Aframax tanker Rio, linked to Cypriot shipowner Andreas Hadjiyiannis, was attacked on Tuesday, October 6, after which a large fire broke out on board.
All 23 crew members — Indian citizens — were rescued. There were no casualties. By Wednesday evening the sailors had been brought ashore; they refused hospitalization.
At first the intense fire prevented rescue services from approaching the vessel. The authorities of the federal territory of Sirius temporarily closed the beaches and advised residents to stay at home.
On Wednesday, October 7, the Russian Ministry of Transport reported that the fire on the tanker had been extinguished. Rescue vessels remained nearby, and the Ministry of Transport, the Emergencies Ministry, the Ministry of Defense, and the authorities of Krasnodar Krai were involved in dealing with the aftermath.
According to local authorities, the damaged tanker drifted along the coast of Sochi’s Lazarevsky district under the influence of the Black Sea current. The Russian Ministry of Transport said that no pollution of the Black Sea by the tanker’s oil cargo had been recorded. The Sochi authorities also said that nighttime and morning air-quality measurements on Wednesday found no exceedance of permissible concentrations of pollutants.
Additional samples in the Central and Khostinsky districts of the city also showed acceptable readings. Rospotrebnadzor, meanwhile, was analyzing seawater in all four districts of Sochi. Despite this, access to the beaches remained restricted on Wednesday afternoon, swimming was banned, and environmental monitoring continued.
Aframax Rio, IMO 9273844, was built in 2004.
Its deadweight is 107,113 tons, its length is 247 meters, its beam is 42 meters, and its gross tonnage is 57,948 tons. According to the ship’s documents, the registered owner of the tanker is Rio Enterprises SA, and the managing company is Hellenic Tankers Co Ltd. Hellenic Tankers was founded by Andreas Hadjiyiannis, who has served as chairman of the board since the company was established. Hadjiyiannis also founded Cyprus Sea Lines and Cyprus Maritime, which, according to the Cyprus Shipping Deputy Ministry, are privately owned.
He previously served as president of the Cyprus Union of Shipowners (CUS). In 2025 that post was taken by Polys Haji-Ioannou. Hadjiyiannis is currently vice-president of the union, according to its executive committee. Aframax Rio is also on Ukraine’s sanctions list because of its alleged involvement in trading Russian oil. Ukraine added Rio to the sanctions list in February 2026, together with another 90 vessels that Kyiv classifies as part of the so-called Russian shadow fleet.
The broader sanctions package is aimed at vessels that, according to the Ukrainian side, took part in transporting Russian oil and petroleum products to third countries. At the same time, Aframax Rio continued to sail from Russian ports throughout 2026. According to data for May, on May 10 the tanker left Novorossiysk and headed for Rabigh in Saudi Arabia, where it arrived in early June. The vessel also appeared in BlackSeaNews data on exports of Russian crude oil from Black Sea ports in May.
The origin and the alleged destination of the cargo on board Aframax Rio at the time of Tuesday’s attack have not been officially confirmed. According to vessel-tracking data cited by Russian media, the last AIS signal from Aframax Rio before the attack was recorded on October 5 at 17:24 UTC. At that moment the tanker was moving at about 7.3 knots. No destination was shown in the system. The vessel’s draft was reported to be 8.4 meters, against a maximum draft of about 14.8 meters. The last registered port of call was Samsun in Turkey.
However, draft data alone cannot reliably determine how much oil was on board the tanker at the time of the attack. The Aframax Rio incident took place against a backdrop of a rising number of attacks on commercial vessels in the Black Sea. Also on Tuesday, drones attacked two commercial vessels in Bulgaria’s exclusive economic zone. One of them sank, and the other caught fire.
The attacks led to rescue operations involving crews of different nationalities and heightened concerns about the safety of commercial shipping in the Black Sea. A day earlier, another merchant vessel was attacked in Romania’s exclusive economic zone, which also required a rescue operation.
Thus the incident with the tanker Aframax Rio became one of a series of attacks on commercial vessels in the Black Sea in recent days, amid a marked increase in risks to civilian shipping in the region.
Source: cyprus-mail.com https://cyprusbutterfly.com.cy/news/svyazannyij-kiprom-tanker-zagorelsya-sochi
