The ship was targeted by a drone near Malta this week, the Transport Ministry in Moscow has said
The Ukrainian attack on a Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) tanker in the Mediterranean Sea is a “terrorist act,” Russian President Vladimir Putin has said.
The Russia-flagged Arctic Metagaz was targeted this week close to Malta’s territorial waters. According to Russia’s Transport Ministry, Ukrainian unmanned boats launched from the Libyan coast hit the LNG carrier, which had been sailing from Murmansk. All 30 crew members were safely evacuated.
Putin said “this is terrorist attack” and added it’s not the first time that Russia has faced energy-related terrorism.
According to the Russian president, Kiev is now preparing, “with the support of some Western intelligence services, to sabotage the Blue Stream and TurkStream” gas pipelines running under the Black Sea, “just as the Nord Stream pipelines were once blown up.” He said it is “a very dangerous game” by Ukraine, adding that Moscow has already informed the Turkish side.
Oil and gas infrastructure in the Black Sea and beyond has repeatedly come under Ukrainian attacks. The attacks involved long-range UAV strikes against various facilities ashore, as well as repeated attempts to target Russian naval vessels patrolling the pipelines with sea drones.
The September 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea is the largest attack on underwater energy infrastructure in modern history. While the theory that it was carried out by a group of Ukrainian divers has become mainstream in the West, Moscow has been skeptical about that version, suggesting instead that Western state actors may have had a hand in the sabotage.
In December 2025, Kiev acknowledged striking the Qendil, a Russia-linked and Omani-flagged oil tanker, in the eastern Mediterranean off Libya’s coast. At the time, Euronews cited a Ukrainian intelligence source describing the attack as “an unprecedented special operation.”
FSB chief Aleksandr Bortnikov warned last October that Ukraine and the UK were jointly preparing an attack on the TurkStream pipeline. London and Kiev have also been plotting attacks on other critical infrastructure sites in Russia, using sea and aerial drones, as well as saboteur divers, Bortnikov said at the time.
