Port of Novorossiysk

• 1. Introduction

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  The Port of Novorossiysk sits on the northeast coast of the Black Sea, tucked inside a bay that stays open for navigation every day of the year. At 8.3 kilometers, its berthing line is the longest of any port in Russia. On the 8th of August 1888, the first vessel to use the new port sailed out loaded with grain. The ship was French, named 'Mingreli', and it left for destinations that a freshly built Russian port could scarcely have imagined reaching. What followed was nearly two centuries of war, reconstruction, nationalization, privatization, oil booms, drone strikes, and grain elevators that were called the best-equipped in the world. How did a fortress on a windswept Cossack bay become one of the largest ports in Europe? And what happens when that port becomes a target in a 21st-century war?

• 2. A Fortress Becomes a Port

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  The Adrianople Treaty of 1829 handed Russia the Sujuk Bay and the surrounding Black Sea coastline after a war with the Ottoman Empire. Russia immediately began fortifying the coast. On the 12th of September 1838 a fortress was founded at Sujuk, and on the 14th of January 1839 it was renamed Novorossiysk by order of the Minister of War. Nicholas I then assigned the name 'Tsemesskaya' to the bay, derived from a local tributary. A royal decree signed on the 30th of June 1845 authorized the construction of a trade port, and by 1846 the fortress had grown into a town.

  That same year the port handled 109 foreign vessels, mostly Turkish, carrying leather, cotton threads, tobacco, crockery, fruit, and sugar. Russian ships brought in construction supplies, salt, and wine. Loading and unloading happened out on open water: launches and feluccas moved freight while horse-drawn carriages handled the inland leg. The town was still cut off from the rich interior provinces of Russia, which kept it peripheral to major Russian commerce.

  The Crimean War destroyed the town. Recovery came slowly. By 1872 Alexander II issued a new decree, setting up a committee to identify good sites for Black Sea ports. Two years later the committee advised that, despite the fierce bora winds, the Tsemes Bay was the right place for a cabotage port. The decisive factor was geography: the bay lay within reach of the Vladikavkaz Railway, which would link the port to the Russian interior via a planned junction at Tikhoretsk-Novorossiysk. The approved construction project required 3.5 million roubles and projected cargo turnover of 30 million poods. The approved site sat on the northwest part of the bay, where the terrain gave some shelter from the wind.

• 3. Private Capital and the Grain Trade

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  Investments from the Vladikavkaz Railway Society alone reached 15 million roubles in early port development, twice the total value of all Novorossiysk's industrial assets combined. Private capital drove the port's growth far more than state spending. East and West berths were opened by 1895, and one was quickly leased to 'Chernomorsky Cement', which brought in raw materials from newly discovered marl pits near the city.

  The grain trade was what gave Novorossiysk its commercial weight. The railroad opened up transport from the Don, the Volga region, and Stavropol, making the port the exit point for vast agricultural output. The Vladikavkaz Railway Company established the Novorossiysk Commercial Agency specifically to control storage and vessel loading. More than 20 wooden, stone, and iron silos went up for grain storage. All loading and drying at that stage was done by hand, requiring close to 1,000 workers.

  To change that, the agency commissioned a grain elevator. The project was designed by Stanislaw Kierbedz and led by engineer A. N. Shesnesevich. Construction ran from 1891 to 1893, and the elevator opened a year after completion. It had two side silos, each holding 364 grain bins with a combined capacity of 47,000 tons, plus towers rising 14 stories. Electrification cut the operating staff to just 60 operators. The expenses totaled 2,418,517 roubles. A three-phase power plant built alongside was described as the first of its kind in the world. The elevator was judged the best-equipped of its era, second in capacity only to one in Chicago. It kept operating through both World Wars, the Russian Civil War, and the Soviet era, before closing in 1972.

• 4. War, Nationalization, Soviet Expansion

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  The Russian Civil War hit the port hard. Red Army and Volunteer Army forces fought over it and left the infrastructure badly damaged. Under Bolshevik control the port was nationalized. In 1921-1922 it played a significant role in delivering food supplies to famine victims in the Volga region, an act honored with the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. The same award was given again when port workers raised the wreck of the 'Elbrus' oil carrier, sunk during World War I.

  Cargo turnover in 1920 was only 16 million thousand tons. By 1923 it had recovered to 1.2 million. By 1926 all berths were back in operation, including a new coal pier later called 'Importniy'. Through the late 1920s and into the Second Five-year Plan, the port doubled the pre-war grain shipment volumes, then doubled its overall turnover. Wooden berths gave way to reinforced concrete. A new harbor basin was built for the cabotage fleet.

  By 1940 the port comprised four loading areas, import and cement docks, a cabotage area, and the West Embankment covering 106.5 hectares. There were 41 operating berths with a total length of 4.69 kilometers, and staff had grown to 2,076 workers including 509 lumpers. In 1940 the port handled 416 vessels and processed 1,554 thousand tons of cargo. World War II reversed all of that. The port served for evacuations and weapons shipments, but by 1943 only one berth of all NSP facilities remained intact. The State Defense Committee ordered reconstruction to begin immediately after the city's liberation. The port officially reopened on the 1st of October 1944, though full reconstruction was not complete until 1950.

• 5. Oil, the Nobel Brothers, and Sheskharis

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  The Nobel brothers and the Rothschilds were the first to move oil through Novorossiysk. The Nobels ran oil storages, a 95-meter pipeline, pumps, a discharge jetty for tank cars, and a berth capable of handling tankers up to 1.5 tons deadweight. One of the Nobel's riveted tanks was still in operational use at the port as late as 1988. The Rothschilds owned the Caspian-Black Sea Oil Company, which co-founded a joint venture with Royal Dutch Shell known in Russia as Russian Standard. In 1882 Russian Standard opened what was called the first oil refinery plant in Russia, and three years later added a 70-kilometer pipeline from Ilsky production fields.

  After nationalization in 1918 oil export became a key source of foreign exchange for the USSR, running steadily through the 1920s and 1930s until the war destroyed all the oil facilities. The question of oil freight at Novorossiysk was not revisited until the 1950s.

  A new transshipment terminal took shape in 1960 by order of the Council of Ministers, personally supervised by Nikita Khrushchev. The site chosen was near Sheskharis Cape on the Tsemes Bay coast, at elevations ranging from 40 to 100 meters above sea level. A parallel tank field of 200,000 cubic meters was built in the Grushevaya Balka area and linked to Sheskharis via a 3,000-meter tunnel through the Markotkh ridge. Oil flowed downhill through the tunnel by gravity. On the 19th of October 1964, the first vessel processed at berth No. 4 was the tanker 'Lihoslavl', bound for Trieste, Italy. By 1966 the terminal's annual cargo turnover had reached 50 million tons and the range of destination countries had expanded to 23. By 2012 the combined Sheskharis oil terminal accounted for more than 30 percent of Russian oil exports.

• 6. The Caspian Pipeline and Global Shareholders

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  Caspian Pipeline Consortium, known as CPC, was established in July 1992 by the governments of Kazakhstan and Oman, with Russia joining later. The pipeline runs from the Tengiz oil field in western Kazakhstan to the port at Novorossiysk. Construction started in May 1999, pipe laying finished in November 2000, and production began in April 2003 after regulatory approval. The terminal uses three Single-Point Mooring systems, which allow tankers to load oil even in difficult weather.

  Between January and November 2018, the terminal loaded 55.129 million tons of oil from the Karachaganak, Kashagan, and Tengiz fields. The shareholding structure reflects how many governments and corporations have a stake in the flow of Caspian oil: Russia holds the largest block via Transneft (24 percent) and CPC Company (7 percent), Kazakhstan holds shares via KazMunayGas (19 percent) and Kazakhstan Pipeline Ventures (1.75 percent), Chevron holds 15 percent, LukArco holds 12.5 percent, and the remaining shares are distributed among Mobil, Rosneft-Shell, BG Overseas, Eni International, and Oryx Caspian Pipeline.

  DeloPorts, the private stevedore holding established by Sergey Shishkarev in 1993 (whose father was the port's operational manager), grew to include the NUTEP container terminal, the KSK grain terminal, and service operations covering bunkering and towing. By the first quarter of 2018 NUTEP ranked second in the Black Sea basin by volume of handled cargo, while KSK was the third-largest grain terminal in the same region.

• 7. Drone Strikes and a Port at War

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  On the night of the 4th of August 2023, a Ukrainian unmanned surface vessel struck the Russian Navy ship Olenegorsky Gornyak in the port. Ukraine's security service, the SBU, carried out the operation using a sea drone loaded with 450 kilograms of TNT. The vessel normally operates in the Barents Sea as part of Russia's Northern Fleet.

  In December 2025, Ukraine's Security Service published footage from inside the port showing an explosion against a pier near the stern of a submarine. The attack was claimed to have used an underwater drone called a "Sub Sea Baby." Russia's Ministry of Defense denied any damage occurred. The UK Ministry of Defence assessed it as highly likely that the target was the submarine B-271 Kolpino and considered it likely that the attack had significantly damaged the vessel, leaving it unable to deploy or sail independently.

  The attacks extended to the oil infrastructure as well. In November 2025 drones and missiles struck the Sheskharis terminal's pumping stations, berthed tankers, and pipelines, halting oil exports from the port. After that attack the United States State Department expressed displeasure with Ukraine, stating that the strike had hurt US business interests. Given that the Sheskharis terminal had accounted for more than 30 percent of Russian oil exports, and that a pipeline linking Tengiz oil in Kazakhstan to global markets terminates there, the geopolitical weight of the port extended well beyond the Black Sea coast.