Discussion
On December 15, 2024, a severe storm in the Kerch Strait triggered one of the most significant environmental disasters in the Black Sea region in recent decades. Two old Russian oil tankers, Volgoneft-212 and Volgoneft-239, broke apart while transporting approximately 9,200 tonnes of mazut, a heavy and highly polluting fuel oil. Between 2,400 and 4,300 tonnes were spilt into the sea, contaminating over 60 kilometres of coastline in Krasnodar Krai and Crimea. Oil slicks reached Sevastopol, blackening beaches and devastating marine life
This paper examines how volunteers and environmental NGOs responded to the December 2024 Black Sea mazut tanker disaster, focusing on the rights to a clean environment and sustained civic engagement. Drawing on over 90 interviews and participant observations in Krasnodar Krai and Crimea (March–April 2025), it analyses self-organisation, coordination, and collective practices using the Political Opportunity Structure framework.
The rapid emergence of this large-scale civic effort presents an empirical and theoretical puzzle. This paper investigates how such mobilisation was possible. Specifically, it asks:
How do moral urgency, digital networks, and political opportunities interact to enable rapid volunteer action in an authoritarian wartime context? The disaster temporarily expanded channels for cooperation between civil society and state authorities under authoritarian conditions. Environmental Watch of the Northern Caucasus played a central coordinating role, alongside independent groups such as Earth Concerns Everyone and government-organised non-governmental organisations (GONGOs), like Ecosystem. In Krasnodar Krai, volunteers acted largely autonomously, driven by ethical commitment and local initiative, whereas in Crimea, volunteer activity was tightly coordinated and controlled by state authorities. These regional contrasts reveal how environmental crises can simultaneously enable and constrain civic action, demonstrating the interplay of moral labour, organisational adaptation, and state engagement in disaster response under authoritarian regimes.
The paper develops a framework for understanding how collective action can emerge, adapt, and institutionalise even in highly repressive wartime contexts. More broadly, the study contributes to debates on activism under authoritarianism, showing how environmental crises may unexpectedly open civic space, reshape interactions between society and the state, and generate new forms of cooperation that are fragile, contested, and profoundly consequential.
