Ukrainians have had little to celebrate as the second anniversary of the Russian invasion looms, but continuing successes in the Black Sea are one surprising bright spot.

On Wednesday, Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence announced it had attacked and destroyed a large landing ship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet – the Caesar Kunikov – with maritime drones off the coast of Crimea. There has been no official comment from Russia about Ukraine’s claim.

Ukraine has virtually no navy of its own, but technological innovation, audacity and Russian incompetence have given it the upper hand in much of the Black Sea. It has now destroyed or disabled more than 20 Russian naval ships in the region, a third of Russia’s total Black Sea fleet.

That in turn has secured a maritime corridor that allows Ukraine to export much of its grain and other produce from ports such as Odesa – an economic boon at a time when the economy has been battered by the conflict.

Amid a bleak winter on the frontlines in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Kharkiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky was at least able to say in an interview this month: “Russia lost many ships, and in the Black Sea we managed to build a grain corridor, so this pragmatic part of the operation with effects on the economy was conducted in a positive way.”

Before the Russian invasion, Ukrainian agriculture accounted for about 11% of the country’s GDP. Agriculture was also a critical source of export revenue (some 40% of the total), which both sustained Ukraine’s farms and influenced global grain prices. Almost all the produce was shipped through the Black Sea.

In July last year, Russia quit the UN-brokered Black Sea Initiative, which had allowed Ukraine safe passage to ship 31.5 million tons of grain and other food products from its ports to world markets. The deal had lasted just under a year.

Rather than fold, the Ukrainians declared a unilateral “Black Sea Humanitarian Corridor” for merchant shipping and stepped up its use of maritime drones and missile attacks against Russia’s Black Sea fleet. The corridor hugs the Ukrainian coast before reaching the waters of two NATO states, Romania and Bulgaria.

The result: Ukraine has shifted 22.6 million tons of cargo through the corridor in just seven months, according to both Ukrainian and US officials. More than 700 ships have used the passage to the Bosphorus and beyond to world markets.

In January alone, according to the Economy Ministry, $1.9 billion worth of Ukrainian exports were shipped by sea (out of a total of $3.4 billion.) That is less than pre-war volumes but is growing every month. Some ships have offset the risk by taking up insurance through a scheme called UNITY, created by the Ukrainian government together with a pool of insurance companies.

When the Black Sea Initiative collapsed, Russia launched drone and missile attacks against port and storage infrastructure and threatened to (but did not) sink vessels carrying cargo to and from Ukraine.

But the Ukrainian military has taken the battle to Russia. One-third of the Black Sea fleet has been disabled or destroyed, and the remaining ships rarely venture into the western half of the sea. In August, Russia withdrew some of the Black Sea fleet from its headquarters in Sevastopol to relatively safer ports on the Russian coast. It has also used nets and sunken barges to try to defend against maritime drones.

Zelensky said during his December visit to Washington that “Russia is hiding the remnants of its naval fleet in remote bays.”

Pletenchuk added that when Russia began its invasion, it had 13 landing ships in the Black Sea. Only five are now serviceable.

Both Wednesday’s attack and the previous one – against a Russian missile ship, the Ivanovets, off the coast of Crimea at the end of last month – were carried out by what the Ukrainians call the MAGURA (Maritime Autonomous Guard Unmanned Robotic Apparatus), which also happens to be the name of a sea goddess.

Drones, missiles and sabotage

Ukraine has pioneered the development and deployment of a range of maritime drones, using them to attack Russian naval ships at sea and when moored at ports in both Crimea and Russia. Both Defense Intelligence and the Security Service, the SBU, have pursued their development.

One of the Black Sea fleet’s main landing ships, the Olenogorsky Gornyak, was crippled by a maritime drone in its home port of Novorossiysk in August, days after the Black Sea Grain Initiative collapsed.

Novorossiysk, near the Russian city of Krasnodar, is Russia’s largest port by volume of cargo handled and is a base for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. One Russian military commentator noted that “it is time to realize that the enemy has a ‘long arm’ and can reach very far with it.”

A Russian chemical and oil tanker – the SIG – was damaged days later by a sea drone in the Kerch Strait.

The speed with which the Ukrainians have developed their fleet of maritime drones has been impressive. The MAGURA-5 is about 5 meters long and has a range of some 450 nautical miles, according to its manufacturer. It is scarcely visible above the waterline and has a payload of 700 pounds (320 kilograms), enough to do serious damage to most ships.

It is also maneuverable, so was able to evade the Ivanovets’ AK-630M defensive guns.

Russian military bloggers have criticized the navy for not doing more to counter the threat. After Wednesday’s attack one of them, Rybar, said that “time after time the Black Sea Fleet is incompetent and unable to repel attacks by Ukrainian formations.”

Ukraine has also used long-range missiles supplied by the UK and France to hit Russian vessels in port in Crimea as well as inflict extensive damage last September on the Black Sea fleet headquarters in Sevastopol, a humiliating blow.

Sabotage and missile attacks against Russian radar and other installations in Crimea have also helped blunt the Russians’ capacity to project power into the Black Sea. So have special operations against Russian-occupied drilling rigs and the expulsion of Russian forces from Snake Island in 2022.

In January the Ukrainians claimed that a special ops unit had taken out a Russian Neva-B radar station (which detects surface shipping) on a platform off the coast of Crimea. The group approached the platform by sea and attached explosives which were then detonated.

However, there are still risks to commercial shipping using the western Black Sea. There have been frequent Russian drone and missile attacks against Odesa, the largest port. The latest was this week.

“The enemy’s priority was once again the coastal belt of infrastructure and agricultural facilities,” Ukraine’s southern command said.

There is also a risk from mines. At least one ship was damaged by a floating mine of unknown origin off the coast of Romania late last year. But the vast majority of vessels have traveled safely to and from Odesa and other Ukrainian ports. Turkey has offered to assist in mine-clearance.

Russia is unlikely to be able to tilt the balance in the Black Sea back in its favor. An international treaty signed in 1936 – the Montreux Convention – prohibits any country that’s at war from moving its ships through the Bosphorus. This means that Moscow cannot reinforce its now-diminished fleet with other naval forces.

Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion, aerial drones have been a vital part of each side’s arsenal – for surveillance, intelligence and strikes. In the last six months, the Ukrainians have used the maritime equivalent to turn the balance of power at sea on its head – and revived an economic lifeline in the process.

About 100 family members of Israeli hostages, including two former hostages, arrived in the Dutch city of The Hague on Wednesday to file a legal complaint against Hamas at the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The complaint, spearheaded by the Hostage and Missing Families Forum (HMFF), calls for the ICC to prosecute Hamas’s leaders for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity over the killing, kidnapping and sexual violence carried out during the October 7 terrorist attack.

The ICC’s chief prosecutor Karim Khan is already investigating potential war crimes committed by both Hamas and Israel since October 7, but has yet to file any charges.

For many of the families, lodging the complaint is about accountability as well as their latest effort to call attention to the captivity of their loved ones.

Israel believes that 130 hostages remain in Gaza from the October 7 attack – with 29 dead and 101 believed to be alive.

“We hope that prosecutor Karim Khan will help us to achieve justice,” said Hagit Chen, the mother of Itay Chen, a 20-year-old Israeli soldier who is also a US citizen. “I need my kid back home. So we hope to get the justice and also that the world will help us to get justice. This situation cannot go on anymore.”

“We hope we’ll start some action against those terrorists,” said Moran Ben Ishay, the daughter of 80-year-old hostage Gadi Moses. “I hope we will stop this evil and get justice, for our family and for all the families that are waiting for their loved ones that are there – the ones that are still alive and the ones that unfortunately are not.”

Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute, which established the ICC, and does not recognize its jurisdiction. But the court’s judges have ruled that it does have jurisdiction over actors in Gaza and other Palestinian territories.

For that reason, said Shelly Aviv Yeini, head of the international law department at the HMFF, the ICC could make Hamas accountable.

“We are an NGO, a private entity,” Yeini said. “We can bring about a claim in the name of the hostages even if the state [Israel] doesn’t recognize its [the ICC’s] jurisdiction.”

“In the event that the information submitted is (potentially) linked to a situation already under investigation (such as the State of Palestine), this information is shared with the relevant investigation team which will consider the information in the context of the team’s ongoing investigative efforts.”

The hostage families’ trip also comes as negotiations over a potential ceasefire deal are ongoing, with top Israeli officials traveling to Cairo on Tuesday to meet with American, Egyptian and Qatari officials.

Those negotiations weighed heavily on the families, many of whom remain frustrated by the slow pace of negotiations and wary of getting too hopeful amid signs of progress in the talks.

The action comes amid an ongoing case brought by South Africa against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), a different court also based at The Hague.

South Africa has accused Israel of being “in violation of its obligations under the Genocide Convention” during the Gaza war, which Israel vehemently denies.

Israel repeatedly raised Hamas’ actions during the genocide case hearing at the ICJ last month, but it cannot file a case against the militant group there as Hamas is not a state. Israel does recognize the ICJ’s jurisdiction, which only seeks to settle disputes between states.

Eighteen of NATO’s 31 members are expected to spend at least 2% of their GDP on defense this year, the treaty organization’s leader said on Wednesday.

“That is another record number and a six-fold increase from 2014 when only three allies met their target,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Wednesday ahead of a meeting between the alliance’s defense ministers in Brussels.

Former US President Donald Trump, who is running for reelection in November, brought renewed scrutiny to the issue of defense spending among NATO members last weekend, when he said at a rally he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member country that doesn’t meet spending guidelines on defense – effectively undercutting the collective defense clause at the heart of the treaty.

Stoltenberg said Monday such comments put European and American soldiers at an increased risk.

“Any suggestion that allies will not defend each other undermines all of our security, including that of the US, and puts American and European soldiers at increased risk,” Stoltenberg said.

The NATO chief acknowledged on Wednesday that criticism of members not spending enough was “a valid point … and a message that has been conveyed by successive US administrations, that European Allies and Canada have to spend more, because we haven’t seen fair burden sharing in the alliance.”

To better share that burden, NATO members pledged a decade ago to increase their defense spending to 2% of GDP for each country.

Among the countries to hit the target recently is Germany. The German Defense Ministry said Wednesday that its 2024 budget will see its defense spending meet the 2% threshold for the first time since the early 1990s.

As a whole, NATO’s European allies are expected to spend 2% of their combined GDP on defense for the first time this year.

Two Chinese fishermen have drowned during a pursuit by Taiwan’s coast guard for trespassing off the coast of Taiwan’s Kinmen islands.

According to the coast guard, an unnamed mainland Chinese vessel had trespassed within about one nautical mile off the coast of Kinmen – which lies nearer to mainland China than to Taiwan.

The vessel capsized while attempting to flee, causing four crew members aboard to fall into the water, it said.

“The coast patrol boat rescued two crew members and found another two unconscious crew members in the sea,” the coast guard said in a statement Wednesday, adding that the two unconscious members were confirmed dead after being taken to the hospital.

China’s Taiwan Affairs Office strongly condemned the deaths and urged the Taiwan authorities to conduct a full investigation.

The Chinese Communist Party regards Taiwan, a self-governing democracy, as part of its territory, despite never having ruled it, and vessels from mainland China are frequently active in the waters near Kinmen due to its geographical proximity.

China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said in its statement about the fishermen’s deaths that “such a vicious incident seriously hurt the feelings of compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Strait during the Spring Festival,” also known as the Lunar New Year holiday, celebrated by both mainland China and Taiwan.

It also accused Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party of being the main reason for the incident, claiming it had used “various excuses to forcefully seize mainland fishing boats and treat mainland fishermen roughly and dangerously.”

According to Taiwan’s coast guard, the case is being investigated and the two rescued crew members have been brought to Kinmen.

The coast guard said they would contact the fishermen’s families through official channels.

A man accused of murdering his girlfriend in Boston before fleeing to Kenya has been re-arrested following his escape from a police station in Nairobi nearly a week ago, police said.

He was now being held at a different police station and his “custody is assured,” Bungei said, adding that the process of his extradition to the United States will continue.

US investigators say he boarded a plane to Kenya shortly after killing his girlfriend on November 1, 2023. Margaret “Maggie” Mbitu’s body was found in Kang’ethe’s SUV in a parking garage at Boston Logan International Airport two days after she was reported missing.

Bungei called the suspect’s “unfortunate” escape last Wednesday from a heavily guarded police station in Nairobi a result of “unethical conduct.”

According to a police report, Kang’ethe escaped “by running away” after a man claiming to be his lawyer appeared at the station asking to speak with him.

Officers released Kang’ethe from his cell and left them alone in an office, from which he then ran off.

Kang’ethe was arrested outside a nightclub in Nairobi on 30th January. Following an application for extradition from the US, Kenyan authorities began the formal process to send him back to Boston to face murder charges.

A mysterious shipwreck suddenly appeared on the shores of a Newfoundland coastal community last month, believed to have been dislodged from the seabed by a fierce storm. Now, as a new storm barrels toward eastern Canada, the community is in a race against time to save it.

The wreck, lodged in shallow waters near the small town of Cape Ray, was discovered by a local resident on the morning of January 20.

As soon as Shawn Bath and Trevor Croft, both from the Clean Harbours Initiative, heard about it, they grabbed their dive gear and rushed down to the beach. Swimming around the vessel, they attempted to secure it by slinging ropes across its 100-foot-long frame.

Both men have been working in the region for two years as part of a coastal clean-up operation in the wake of Hurricane Fiona, which slammed into Canada’s Atlantic Coast in 2022 as one of the most powerful storms in the country’s history.

Bath believes it was Hurricane Fiona that initially dislodged the shipwreck from its resting place, before it slowly drifted toward the southwestern coastline of Newfoundland island, pushed along by storms and sea swells.

Now, as a new storm approaches, the community is scrambling to stop the vessel being destroyed by the same elements that brought it to their shores.

The Cape Ray shipwreck is an example of a wider phenomenon, experts say, where climate change-fueled storms are uncovering the world’s underwater history — but also destroying it.

The wreck’s origins and age remain unknown. Croft said it may be a French or British ship possibly around 200 years old, but until it comes out of the water, it’s all guesswork, he said.

Lisa Briggs, an underwater archaeologist and research fellow at Cranfield University in the UK, said the wreck is significant for the community because it could be a clue as to how people arrived on the island.

But this preserved slice of local history is at risk. The tides are already weakening the vessel. While the wood is in good shape, it is held together with copper and brass pins. “Every time the wave goes underneath that ship and raises it up a little bit, those beams get looser and looser,” Bath said.

The approaching storm, forecast to arrive Wednesday evening, has raised the stakes even further. Forecasts suggest wind gusts of 25 mph around Cape Ray with waves up to 20 feet.

“The wreck could just pretty much disintegrate,” Croft said.

Without government funds to extract and preserve the wreck, Bath and Croft are trying to raise funds through a GoFundMe campaign. Their aim is to pull the wreck from the water to preserve it and, ultimately, put it on display as a tourist attraction for this remote community.

“It’s a race against time,” Croft said.

The phenomenon of storms dislodging shipwrecks from seabeds — where they have sometimes rested for centuries — is not uncommon, Briggs said, especially as climate change fuels more powerful and more intense storms.

While that might sound like a good thing for underwater archaeologists, it often isn’t, she added. When storms rip the protective layers of sand off shipwrecks, they can cause irretrievable damage. “It’s much better if the archaeologists themselves are gently removing sand in a controlled way,” Briggs said.

Climate change presents other threats to shipwrecks, too, Briggs added.

Rising levels of carbon pollution in the atmosphere are changing the chemistry of seawater, making it more acidic. This can accelerate the disintegration of delicate, organic materials preserved on wrecks, such as ropes, sails and textiles.

Then there’s the underwater archeologist’s nightmare: shipworms. These worm-shaped mollusks have a voracious appetite for wood.

Shipworms have traditionally only been found in warmer waters, meaning wrecks in the colder waters were considered safe from their destruction. But as the oceans warm, the mollusks are migrating further north. In 2016, archaeologists hauled up a piece of wood from the Arctic seafloor teeming with slimy, white shipworms.

“The more we see climate change affecting our world today, the more damage we’re going to see to submerged cultural heritage,” Briggs said.

It matters, she said, because ships tell a unique story about our past. “You have this one moment in time, that’s been perfectly crystallized on the seafloor,” she said.

In Cape Ray, Croft and Bath are doing all they can to protect the mysterious wreck.

Bath can’t quite believe how much of a challenge it has been. “Something so beautiful drifts ashore in this little town,” he said, “and we’re struggling to get finances to haul it out of the water before the storms destroy it.”

Ukraine claims it has now disabled a third of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet after its military intelligence said it sank another Russian warship in a sea drone attack off the coast of Crimea on Wednesday.

Russia’s landing ship Caesar Kunikov was attacked with “MAGURA” V5 drones that punctured “critical holes” on its left side before sinking, the Ukrainian military intelligence agency said on Telegram.

That aligns with Ukrainian claims last week that they had disabled about 33% of Russia’s warships, amounting to 24 disabled ships and one submarine. The landing ship Caesar Kunikov would be the 25th disabled ship, according to Ukraine’s count.

Wednesday’s attack was conducted by the agency’s “Group 13” special forces unit in cooperation with Ukraine’s security and defense forces, the statement said.

Night-time footage provided by Ukraine showed a sea drone racing toward the Caesar Kunikov, before a huge plume of smoke rose from the vessel.

“This has to do with the course of the special military operation, so it is the prerogative of the Ministry of Defense. I suggest you refer to the statements of our military colleagues. I can’t say anything about this,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in a news briefing.

Wednesday’s attack is the latest in a series of Ukrainian strikes on Russia’s navy, as it tries to land both strategic and symbolic blows against Russian forces that annexed Crimea in 2014.

As Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nears its second anniversary, the frontlines have for months remained mostly static. But since last year Ukraine has pivoted to the Black Sea, saying its strikes on Crimea and Russian ships are intended to isolate the peninsula and make it more difficult for Russia to sustain its military operations on the Ukrainian mainland.

Earlier this month, Ukraine said it sank the Ivanovets, a Russian guided-missile ship, also in the Black Sea. Its most notable strike was on the Moskva in April 2022, which forced Russia to change the way it operates close to areas controlled by Ukraine.

But they have a large range of around 800 kilometers (nearly 500 miles), so military units can launch drones from across large swathes of Ukraine’s coastline for missions against Crimean targets.

“It is these unmanned systems – such as drones – along with other types of advanced weapons, that provide the best way for Ukraine to avoid being drawn into a positional war, where we do not possess the advantage,” Zaluzhnyi wrote.

“No warship can be as maneuverable as these drones,” the pilot added.

Ukraine claims it has now disabled a third of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet after its military intelligence said it sank another Russian warship in a sea drone attack off the coast of Crimea on Wednesday.

Russia’s landing ship Caesar Kunikov was attacked with “MAGURA” V5 drones that punctured “critical holes” on its left side before sinking, the Ukrainian military intelligence agency said on Telegram.

That aligns with Ukrainian claims last week that they had disabled about 33% of Russia’s warships, amounting to 24 disabled ships and one submarine. The landing ship Caesar Kunikov would be the 25th disabled ship, according to Ukraine’s count.

Wednesday’s attack was conducted by the agency’s “Group 13” special forces unit in cooperation with Ukraine’s security and defense forces, the statement said.

Night-time footage provided by Ukraine showed a sea drone racing toward the Caesar Kunikov, before a huge plume of smoke rose from the vessel.

“This has to do with the course of the special military operation, so it is the prerogative of the Ministry of Defense. I suggest you refer to the statements of our military colleagues. I can’t say anything about this,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in a news briefing.

Wednesday’s attack is the latest in a series of Ukrainian strikes on Russia’s navy, as it tries to land both strategic and symbolic blows against Russian forces that annexed Crimea in 2014.

As Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nears its second anniversary, the frontlines have for months remained mostly static. But since last year Ukraine has pivoted to the Black Sea, saying its strikes on Crimea and Russian ships are intended to isolate the peninsula and make it more difficult for Russia to sustain its military operations on the Ukrainian mainland.

Earlier this month, Ukraine said it sank the Ivanovets, a Russian guided-missile ship, also in the Black Sea. Its most notable strike was on the Moskva in April 2022, which forced Russia to change the way it operates close to areas controlled by Ukraine.

But they have a large range of around 800 kilometers (nearly 500 miles), so military units can launch drones from across large swathes of Ukraine’s coastline for missions against Crimean targets.

“It is these unmanned systems – such as drones – along with other types of advanced weapons, that provide the best way for Ukraine to avoid being drawn into a positional war, where we do not possess the advantage,” Zaluzhnyi wrote.

“No warship can be as maneuverable as these drones,” the pilot added.

Ukraine claims it has evidence Russia fired an advanced hypersonic missile – one that experts say is almost impossible to shoot down – for the first time in the almost 2-year-old war.

The government-run Kyiv Scientific Research Institute of Forensic Expertise said in a Telegram post that debris recovered after a February 7 attack on the Ukrainian capital pointed to the use of a Zircon hypersonic cruise missile by the Russian military.

“Markings on the parts and fragments, the identification of components and parts, and the features of the relevant type of weapon” point to the first-ever use of the Zircon in combat, said the institute, which is part of Ukraine’s Justice Ministry.

The Telegram post was accompanied by a video showing dozens of pieces of debris believed to be from the new missile.

Ukrainian authorities reported four people were killed and 38 others injured in Kyiv during the February 7 attacks, but no casualties have been directly attributed to the alleged Zircon missile.

There was also no mention of the launch platform for the missile, though previous reports in Russian state media say it has been deployed on a warship.

Experts say the Zircon, if it lives up to what the Russian government says about it, is a formidable weapon.

Its hypersonic speed makes it invulnerable to even the best Western missile defenses, like the Patriot, according to the United States-based Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance (MDAA).

The alliance says its speed has been put at Mach 8, or almost 9,900 kilometers per hour (6,138 mph). Hypersonic is defined as any speed above Mach 5 (3,836 mph).

“If that information is accurate, the Zircon missile would be the fastest in the world, making it nearly impossible to defend against due to its speed alone,” the alliance says on its website.

The site also points to the missile’s plasma cloud as another “valuable” feature.

“During flight, the missile is completely covered by a plasma cloud that absorbs any rays of radio frequencies and makes the missile invisible to radars. This allows the missile to remain undetected on its way to the target,” it says.

Additionally, the MDAA says the Zircon is “a maneuvering anti-ship hypersonic cruise missile” with a range of somewhere between 500 and 1,000 kilometers (310 to 620 miles).

When the Russian navy frigate Admiral Gorshkov set out on a combat mission last January, leader Vladimir Putin boasted about the Zircon missiles the ship was carrying.

“It has no analogues in any country in the world,” Putin said, according to a report from the state media agency TASS. “I am sure that such powerful weapons will reliably protect Russia from potential external threats and will help ensure the national interests of our country,” he added.

If Russia has introduced the new weapon into the conflict, it could mean trouble for a Ukrainian air defense already straining to repel Moscow’s aerial attacks.

For instance, in that February 7 attack in which the Zircon was allegedly used, three Iskander ballistic missiles and four Kh-22 cruise missiles fired by Russian forces evaded attempts to bring them down, data from Ukraine’s air force shows.

Although air defenses have brought down Iskander missiles in the past, it is believed that Ukraine has failed to intercept a single Kh-22 in almost two years of war. Speaking in December, Ukrainian Air Force spokesperson Yurii Ihnat said that Russia had fired almost 300 Kh-22s so far in the war.

Ukraine’s air defenses did have some success during the February 7 attack, bringing down 26 of 29 Kh-101, Kh-555 and Kh-55 type cruise missiles, all three Kalibr cruise missiles and 15 of 20 Shahed drones fired by Russia. But those are less-advanced than the Zircon.

Despite that, analysts caution not to exaggerate the impact the use of the Zircon could have on the war as a whole.

As it is a new – and expensive – technology, one question is, how many has Russia produced?

A key “consideration is Russia’s ability to produce and field a capability like Zircon at scale, especially as the program will compete for financial and other resources with priorities like rebuilding the Russian ground forces,” Sidharth Kaushal, research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, wrote last year after the Admiral Gorshkov allegedly deployed with Zircons aboard.

An overturned vessel has caused a huge oil spill along Trinidad and Tobago’s coastline, in what the Caribbean country’s prime minister described as a “national emergency” on Sunday.

The spill occurred on February 7 off the southern shores of the Tobago Island, according to the country’s Office of Disaster Preparedness and Management (ODPM). About 15 kilometers (9 miles) of the coastline “is now blackened,” the agency said in a statement Saturday.

Photos from the scene show recovery workers wading through thick black sludge, with huge areas of the beach covered in oil. Several government agencies, including at least 1,000 volunteers, have been working to control the spill.

Prime Minister Keith Rowley said in a news conference Sunday that “the situation is not under control.” The origins of the vessel have not yet been identified, he added.

“This is a national emergency and therefore it will have to be funded as an extraordinary expense,” Rowley said, adding, “we don’t know the full scope and scale of what is going to be required.”

Authorities installed booms – floating barriers – to prevent the spill from spreading to other areas, said Farley Augustine, the chief secretary of the Tobago House of Assembly. Officials have also dispatched divers to try to plug the leak but have not been successful.

“What has to happen is that we have to find a way to now extract every bit of oil that’s in the vessel, bearing in mind as we have been reiterating – not knowing the schematics of the vessel,” Augustine told reporters.

“We’re not sure if it’s a freighter, a tanker, or a barge because only the keel of the vessel is visible. And its identifying physical characteristics are in water that we can’t penetrate for the moment,” Rowley said Sunday.

“But we do know it appears to be broken having made contact here and is leaking some kind of hydrocarbon that is fouling the water and the coastline,” he added.

Residents in the local area of Lambeau reported a constant stench from the spill, leaving some worried about their health, according to local media.

Augustine, the chief secretary of the Tobago House of Assembly, advised those with respiratory illnesses to use masks and “self-relocate or find ways to mitigate against that.”

The spill took place during Carnival season, one of the country’s biggest tourist attractions.

“The best part of Tobago’s economy is its tourism, so it is important that we be cognizant that we don’t expose the tourism product to this kind of thing, and because this has happened, we have to contain it,” the prime minister said.