All 23 Indian crew leave the Aframax Rio after drone boats set it on fire off Sochi

All 23 Indian crew members of the Liberia-flagged tanker Aframax Rio were taken off the ship on Tuesday after unmanned surface vessels set it on fire off Sochi, on Russia's Black Sea coast. Russia's transport ministry said the entire crew was Indian and that no one was hurt, on preliminary information. A ministry spokesman told TASS the crew had been saved and evacuated to shore.

The attack was the second tanker strike in the Black Sea in two days to put a crew of seafarers into a rescue. Bulgaria ended the search on Wednesday for 12 Syrian sailors from a ship sunk about 70 nautical miles off its coast. The Sochi fire had a different ending. Everyone got off.

A fire that kept the boats back

Regional authorities in Sirius, in Krasnodar region, reported the fire first. The transport ministry said oil was burning in the open at sea, and that rescue vessels could not move in at once because of the intensity of the blaze. Firefighters later had enough resources to work the fire once it dropped. Footage shared on Tuesday night showed a line of flame and a column of black smoke visible from the city.

Transport minister Andrey Nikitin held a headquarters meeting on the aftermath. The ministry has described the strike as an attack by unmanned vessels, the small explosive boats that have hit Russian naval and commercial shipping in the Black Sea since 2022. Ukrainian-aligned accounts claimed the hit. Russian official statements identified the weapon type and the rescue, and did not name a state as the attacker in the first bulletins.

Why the crew list matters in India

An Aframax is a medium crude carrier, typically about 80,000 to 120,000 deadweight tonnes, sized for ports that cannot take the largest tankers. The Rio was under a Liberian flag with an all-Indian crew, a common arrangement on the tanker trades that still call at Russian oil ports. India's interest in the incident is not abstract. Twenty-three Indian nationals were on a ship that was burning off a Russian resort city, and the only official injury report so far is that none of them was hurt.

New Delhi has not, in the accounts published on Wednesday, issued a separate casualty list. The Russian ministry's figure is the one in circulation: 23 rescued, no injuries on preliminary data. Families will want a named list and a port of landing. Those details were not in the first ministry statement.

A coast that is no longer a rear area

Sochi sits at the eastern end of the Black Sea, far from the Ukrainian coast and from the grain corridor that has taken most of the public attention. A burning tanker visible from the city moves the war's shipping risk east. The Bulgarian sinking, on the western side of the same sea, showed the other edge of the same problem: a drone strike, a ship down, a crew missing, and no claim of responsibility.

The Rio's crew are ashore. The ship is not. Oil on the water, a fire that held rescue boats off, and a headquarters meeting called by the transport minister are the operational facts. The political fact is narrower. Two merchant ships in the Black Sea were hit within a day, one of them crewed entirely by Indians, and neither strike has a named author in the official record.