Maritime Security and Safety
Stella Maris Launches Front-line Safety Kits for Seafarers at Ukrainian Ports Amid Growing Global Maritime Tensions
Stella Maris Launches Front-line Safety Kits for Seafarers at Ukrainian Ports Amid Growing Global Maritime Tensions
Maritime welfare charity equips vessel crews with battlefield-grade medical supplies, multilingual air raid guides and shelter maps as missile and drone attacks on Black Sea ports escalate — with warnings that risks are multiplying across key global shipping corridors including the Strait of Hormuz.
By Raymond Gold | Co-Publisher & Research Reporter, Waterways News, Lagos
Monday, March 16, 2026 | Lagos
ODESA, UKRAINE / LAGOS — In one of the most direct responses yet to the dangerous reality facing merchant mariners in active war zones, international maritime welfare charity Stella Maris has launched a pioneering crew safety kit initiative tailored specifically for seafarers calling at Ukrainian ports — where missile and drone strikes have become a recurring threat to ships and the men and women who crew them.
The kits, funded through a partnership with Norwegian war risk insurer Den Norske Krigsforsikring for Skib (DNK), represent a tangible acknowledgement that thousands of seafarers continue to transit some of the world’s most dangerous maritime corridors every month — often with little more than instinct and experience to guide them when the sirens begin to wail.
What Is Inside the Kit
Each crew safety kit has been assembled with battlefield-grade medical priorities in mind. The medical components include haemostatic tourniquets — the type routinely used by combat medics to halt life-threatening limb bleeding — as well as pressure bandages and burn treatment supplies designed to manage flash burns, a common injury type in blast and explosion scenarios.
Beyond the medical supplies, the kit addresses a gap that Stella Maris port chaplains have repeatedly observed at Ukrainian docks: crews arriving onboard without any knowledge of local emergency procedures. The kits therefore include printed step-by-step protocols to follow during an air raid alert, detailed maps marking the nearest public shelters, and information stickers formatted for display on ship bulkheads — ensuring critical guidance is visible at a glance even in conditions of extreme stress and time pressure.
Crucially, all instructional materials are multilingual, recognising that a typical vessel calling at Odesa or other Ukrainian ports may carry a crew drawn from the Philippines, India, Georgia, Turkey, Egypt, or a dozen other seafaring nations.
‘Preparedness Is Often the Only Thing You Can Control’
Father Alexander Smerechynskyy, Stella Maris Ukraine National Director and Odesa Port Chaplain, has been present for the harrowing reality that prompted the kits’ development. Stationed at one of the Black Sea’s most strategic and most targeted ports, he has watched foreign mariners disembark into a city that has endured repeated aerial bombardment, often bewildered by the sudden wail of air raid sirens and unsure where to run.
“Many overseas crews arrive without clear instructions on what to do during an air raid. In a war zone, preparedness is often the only thing you can control, and it can be the difference between life and death.”— Father Alexander Smerechynskyy, Stella Maris Ukraine National Director & Odesa Port Chaplain
Father Smerechynskyy stressed that the kit is more than a collection of objects. “Our safety kits provide not only essential medical equipment but also clear multilingual instructions, maps to shelters, and QR links to emergency guidance,” he said. “It is not just a set of items. It is a practical safety system designed to reduce panic and increase the chances of survival during an attack.”
DNK Funding and the Broader Strategic Context
The initiative has been made possible through funding from DNK — Den Norske Krigsforsikring for Skib — Norway’s specialist marine war risk insurer, which underwrites vessels trading into conflict-affected zones across the globe. DNK’s financial backing has enabled Stella Maris to produce and distribute the first wave of safety kits to ships currently calling at Ukrainian ports, with further distribution expected as demand grows.
The timing of the launch is significant. While the Russia-Ukraine war has dominated global maritime risk discourse since February 2022, the industry is simultaneously grappling with escalating tensions in multiple other critical corridors. In the Red Sea, Houthi missile and drone attacks have forced dozens of major shipping lines to abandon the Suez Canal route entirely, pushing vessels on costly and time-consuming diversions around the Cape of Good Hope. In the Gulf, jitters around the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow chokepoint through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil passes — continue to unsettle operators and insurers alike.
Stella Maris CEO: Seafarers Are on the Frontline of Conflicts They Didn’t Choose
Tim Hill, Chief Executive of Stella Maris UK, placed the Ukraine initiative within this wider landscape of growing danger for the maritime workforce — a largely invisible population that keeps global trade flowing even when the world around them descends into conflict.
“With geopolitical tensions increasing in several key shipping routes, including the current situation around the Strait of Hormuz, the risks faced by seafarers are growing. Crews are often on the frontline of global conflicts they have no part in. That makes practical preparation and clear safety guidance more important than ever for seafarers operating in high-risk regions.” — Tim Hill, CEO, Stella Maris UK
Hill’s remarks carry particular weight given the scale of the seafarer welfare crisis unfolding quietly at sea. Maritime labour experts estimate that at any given time, several hundred commercial vessels are transiting regions designated as high-risk zones by war risk underwriters — exposing tens of thousands of seafarers, the majority from developing nations, to dangers that their shore-based employers are often slow to adequately acknowledge or prepare them for.
Implications for Nigerian and West African Shipping
For Nigeria and West Africa’s maritime sector, the Stella Maris initiative serves as both a model and a reminder. Nigeria remains one of the most significant sources of maritime labour on the African continent, and a growing number of Nigerian seafarers serve aboard vessels engaged in deep-sea trades that routinely pass through or near conflict-affected waters. Industry observers have long called for shipowners and manning agencies to do more to equip Nigerian crew members with the safety awareness, protective gear, and emergency protocols necessary to survive in high-risk environments.
Port chaplaincy organisations with a presence in Lagos, Port Harcourt, and Warri are expected to watch the Stella Maris Ukraine model closely, as the Gulf of Guinea itself remains a zone of persistent maritime insecurity — albeit from piracy and armed robbery at sea rather than state-sponsored aerial bombardment.
A Practical Safety System for a Dangerous Age
The first wave of Stella Maris crew safety kits is already being distributed to vessels calling at Ukrainian ports. The charity has indicated that distribution will continue and potentially expand depending on available funding and demand from operators in other high-risk zones.
In an era when container ships are dodging missiles over the Black Sea and tankers are rerouting around the Red Sea to avoid drone strikes, the humble safety kit — with its tourniquet, its burn dressing, its hand-drawn map to the nearest air raid shelter — has become a symbol of a maritime industry still grappling with what it truly means to keep its most essential workers safe.
Stella Maris is the Catholic Church’s international seafarer welfare charity, operating across more than 300 ports globally. It provides pastoral, practical, and welfare support to seafarers of all faiths and nationalities.
Den Norske Krigsforsikring for Skib (DNK) is a Norwegian mutual war risk insurer specializing in hull and cargo war risk coverage for vessels operating in conflict-affected regions.
FIVE DEAD, 41 MISSING AS FIRE GUTS INDONESIAN FERRY CARRYING 271
By Raymond Gold | Waterways News
At least five people are dead and 41 others remain missing after a passenger ferry caught fire off Indonesia’s Madura Island on Sunday, triggering a major multi-agency search and rescue operation involving naval and civilian vessels.
The Mutiara Sentosa 2, sailing the roughly 40-hour Surabaya to Makassar route with 271 people on board, including 232 passengers and 39 crew members, caught fire between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. local time in waters off Sumenep regency, Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency said. The vessel was also reportedly carrying 181 vehicles, mostly trucks, and an excavator.
About an hour after the blaze started, ferry operator PT Atosim Lampung Pelayaran alerted the Surabaya Search and Rescue Office, after the vessel’s captain radioed a distress report saying the ship was ablaze near the northern tip of Madura Island. Contact with the vessel was then lost.
By 9:45 a.m., rescuers had pinpointed the ferry’s location, roughly 19 nautical miles north of Buruan Sapudi Island, after reaching the nearby cargo ship Meratus Project 3. That vessel, however, could not approach the burning ferry closely because it was carrying a flammable load. A tugboat and another passing vessel became the first responders, beginning evacuations shortly before 10 a.m., before more ships joined the operation.
By Sunday afternoon, several nearby vessels had rescued 225 passengers and crew and recovered five bodies, with 41 people still unaccounted for. Basarnas dispatched a rescue vessel from Surabaya, though officials estimated a six-hour transit time to the scene, and a rigid inflatable boat sent from the Sumenep rescue post was forced to turn back due to rough seas and high waves. An Indonesian naval warship has since joined the search.
The cause of the fire has not been established and remains under investigation. It is the second major Indonesian maritime distress incident in as many months. Last month, rescuers searched for survivors after the KM Nurul Salsa suffered engine failure and sank, with five survivors, including a seven-year-old girl, recovered days later.
NIGERIA WATCH
Indonesia’s tragedy off Madura should sound familiar to anyone tracking Nigeria’s own inland and coastal waterways. Strip away the geography and the pattern is the same one that recurs on the Niger, the Benue and the Niger Delta creeks every rainy season. Overloaded or ill-equipped vessels, delayed distress reporting, and rescue assets that arrive too late or cannot reach the casualty at all.
The detail that should trouble Nigerian regulators most is the nearby cargo ship that could not assist the burning ferry because it was itself carrying flammable cargo. This is a reminder that firefighting capability, not just headcount, is the real test of vessel safety. NIMASA and NIWA have made real strides on the Seafarer Discharge Book digitization and the CVFF portal, but neither agency has articulated a clear standard for onboard fire-suppression systems on domestic ferries, particularly those plying the country’s inland waterways that operators like WABOTAN and ATBOWATON know well.
There is also a lesson for NIWA and LASWA in the response timeline. Indonesian rescuers, despite dispatching a navy warship and multiple agency assets, still needed roughly six hours to reach the vessel, and one rescue boat had to turn back in rough seas. Nigeria’s own record on Benue and Niger Delta boat accidents shows the same gap between a distress call and an effective response, a gap that NIWA’s enforcement push and the LASWA-Interferry Ferry Safety Development Programme are meant to close, but which will keep costing lives until vessel-side fire and lifesaving equipment compliance is treated with the same urgency as overloading and life-jacket enforcement.
Maritime Security and Safety
HORMUZ SHADOW FLEET: HOW A WAR-ZONE WORKAROUND IS QUIETLY KEEPING THE WORLD’S OIL MARKET ALIVE
HORMUZ SHADOW FLEET: HOW A WAR-ZONE WORKAROUND IS QUIETLY KEEPING THE WORLD’S OIL MARKET ALIVE
By Oghenewoke Osaweren | Waterways News
Beneath the surface calm of a fragile Middle East ceasefire, a covert maritime operation is doing what diplomacy has not been able to do. It is keeping oil flowing out of the world’s most contested waterway. Tankers with their transponders deliberately switched off are meeting far offshore, transferring millions of barrels ship-to-ship, and disappearing back into commercial shipping lanes before regulators, insurers, or belligerents can react.
This is not a new tactic. It is the same “dark fleet” playbook sanctioned Iranian, Russian, and Venezuelan crude have relied on for years. What has changed is who is now using it, and why a legitimate, US-escorted oil trade has been forced to borrow the tradecraft of sanctions evasion just to survive.
THE NUMBERS TELL A STORY OF FRAGILE NORMALITY
Satellite imagery over the Omani port of Sohar recorded at least seven tanker-pair transfers in a single day this week, several involving supertanker-class vessels capable of moving a combined 8 million barrels. Two weeks earlier, at the height of renewed US-Iran hostilities, that same stretch of water saw only two such transfers. The swing illustrates how tightly oil-market stability in 2026 is now tethered not to production levels, but to a handful of shipowners’ daily risk calculus.
Even with the rebound, flows remain a fraction of the roughly 20 million barrels a day that once transited the Strait of Hormuz before the war. US officials now put total Gulf exit volumes at around 13 million barrels daily, split roughly evenly between the strait itself and bypass pipelines built precisely to reduce dependence on Hormuz. American forces say they have personally escorted close to 500 million barrels out of the strait since May, a scale of military involvement in commercial shipping rarely seen outside declared war.
WHAT THIS MEANS BEYOND THE GULF
For Nigeria and other non-Gulf producers, a Hormuz shuttle trade that works, however imperfectly, is a double-edged development. It has so far kept a full-blown price shock at bay, with Brent oscillating between $80 and $100 rather than spiking uncontrollably, which shields Nigeria’s import-heavy fuel supply chain and naira-denominated energy costs from the worst-case scenario. But it also means Gulf producers are adapting fast enough to defend their market share even under bombardment, a resilience that could blunt any window Nigerian and West African crude grades might otherwise have gained as buyers hedged away from Hormuz-dependent barrels.
There is also a governance dimension worth flagging for Nigerian maritime observers. The same AIS-dark, ship-to-ship transfer tactics now legitimising emergency oil flows out of the Gulf are structurally identical to the techniques long used for illegal bunkering and crude theft in the Niger Delta and Gulf of Guinea. When a G7 navy escorts and effectively normalises transponder-dark transfers as sound commercial practice under conflict conditions, it complicates the international case for treating the same behaviour as inherently criminal in West African waters, an inconsistency Nigerian regulators and NIMASA may eventually have to reckon with.
A MARKET RUNNING ON DELAYED CARGOES, NOT CONFIDENCE
Perhaps the clearest sign of how strained the system remains: buyers of Emirati crude, including cargoes tied to ADNOC tenders, are only now receiving shipments that were due weeks ago, some having incurred demurrage costs on ships hired to collect oil that never showed up on schedule. ADNOC’s shipping unit has itself had to book a tanker for a Sohar ship-to-ship pickup, effectively routing its own state oil company’s cargo through the same shadow logistics used to dodge attacks.
The picture that emerges is not one of a market that has stabilised, but of a market that has adapted to instability, one satellite pass at a time.
Maritime Security and Safety
Search Continues for 17 Missing as Vietnamese Cargo Vessel Sinks in South China Sea
Search Continues for 17 Missing as Vietnamese Cargo Vessel Sinks in South China Sea
Rescuers are still combing waters near a contested reef system in the South China Sea after a Vietnamese-flagged cargo vessel went down over the weekend, leaving 17 crew members unaccounted for.
Of the 62 people who were aboard the vessel, the Khoi Nguyen 18, when it ran into difficulty, 45 have so far been pulled to safety, Vietnamese officials confirmed.
According to Chinese state media, the roughly 70-metre freighter got into trouble close to Yongshu Reef, also called Fiery Cross Reef, off China’s Hainan province. A Chinese rescue vessel, the Nanhai Jiu 115, first picked up what appeared to be a distress flare from the stricken ship on Saturday evening, shortly before 6:30pm local time.
The search-and-rescue effort has drawn in a sizeable multinational response: six Chinese vessels, a rescue helicopter, and a Vietnamese ship have all joined the operation, state news agency Xinhua reported.
A flashpoint waterway
The sinking adds to safety concerns in one of the world’s most disputed maritime zones. China claims sovereignty over the vast majority of the South China Sea — a position an international tribunal rejected in a landmark 2016 ruling brought by the Philippines.
Among the most contentious areas are the Spratly Islands (known in China as the Nansha Islands), where Beijing has built airstrips and fortified artificial islands. China’s claims overlap with those of Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, and Taiwan, making the region a persistent source of regional friction and, as this incident shows, a challenging one for maritime emergency response.
Search efforts were ongoing at the time of filing.
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