Boiling oil flowed into the streets of Tuapse this week. A Ukrainian drone strike on 28 April, the third in less than two weeks, reignited fires that had been burning since 16 April at one of Russia's top ten refineries, the only major facility on its Black Sea coast.
Krasnodar Krai Governor Veniamin Kondratyev ordered the evacuation of residents in the area. More than 300 emergency personnel were deployed. Black rain has been falling on the city since the second strike on 20 April. An oil slick of around 10,000 square meters spread across the Black Sea after the first.
The smoke plume from Tuapse is visible from Krasnaya Polyana, around 100 kilometers down the coast.
That's the ski resort built for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. Krasnaya Polyana means "Red Glade" in Russian. The name has nothing to do with snow.
Forgotten genocide on Russia's Black Sea coast
On 21 May 1864, Russian forces held a victory parade at a place the Adyghe people called Kbaada. The Russian Empire had been at war in the Caucasus for a hundred years. The parade marked the end. Approximately 20,000 Adyghe, mostly from the Ubykh tribe, had made a final stand there against around 250,000 Russian troops, according to Ukrainian historians who marked the date this year.
The Russians renamed the site Krasnaya Polyana. By "red," they meant blood.
The Adyghe, called Circassians by their neighbors and on European maps from the 16th century onward, had lived along the Black Sea coast and in the Caucasus mountains since at least the 6th century. They had their own laws, an elaborate culture, and one of the most complex languages in the world. By the time Russia's southern conquest reached them in the late 18th century, they numbered in the millions.
By 1864, ninety percent of them were gone.
What General Velyaminov did
The town now called Tuapse was founded in 1838 as a Russian fort named Velyaminovskoye, after General Alexei Velyaminov, who had proposed what Russian military historians call "a new strategy for the conquest of the Caucasus." The strategy was attrition. Russian forces destroyed villages, burned crops, and poisoned wells to engineer famine. They shelled Adyghe settlements with artillery from the sea.
Velyaminov's protégé, General Grigory Zass, took the work further. He paid his soldiers for the severed heads of Circassians. The heads were boiled in cauldrons in his camp, and the cleaned skulls were sent to the Russian Academy of Sciences to the Kunstkamera, Russia's first museum, in St. Petersburg, and to anatomical collections in European universities.
Fatima Tlisova, an ethnic Circassian journalist who has worked at Voice of America, has written about her family's oral history of the conquest. Russian troops attacked villages at night, hoping to catch people asleep. Often, the villagers escaped only because their animals raised the alarm first. Later, the survivors understood why: the Russian columns moved with carts of severed body parts, and the smell carried ahead of them.
Expulsion
After the surrender at Kbaada in 1864, the Russian Empire deported the surviving Adyghe. They were Muslims; the destination was the Ottoman Empire. The Russian term for the operation was the same one used for routine forced relocations: pereselenie. The Circassians have their own word for exile—muhajirstvo.
Tens of thousands were held in camps along the Black Sea coast at the ports of Sochi and Sukhumi. They lived on bare ground without sufficient food, water, or shelter. Typhus killed many of them before the ships arrived. To board, they had to pay. Ships built for 100 passengers carried 300 to 400. Many drowned from suffocation or starvation in transit. Many ships sank in Black Sea storms.
Estimates of the dead and expelled run from 1.2 million to 2.8 million people, between ninety and ninety-seven percent of the Circassian population. The largest Circassian diaspora today lives in Türkiye. Their language is endangered. Approximately 700,000 to 800,000 Circassians remain in the Caucasus, divided among three small Russian republics: Adygea, Karachay-Cherkessia, and Kabardino-Balkaria.
Olympic Village
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For Vladimir Putin, the 2014 Winter Olympics were a prestige project. Russia spent more than $50 billion on them, the most expensive Games ever held. The Olympic mountain cluster, where the alpine and sliding events took place, was built at Krasnaya Polyana. Circassian activists from across the diaspora petitioned the International Olympic Committee, asking that the Games not be held on the burial site of the people they had erased. The IOC declined to intervene.
The opening ceremony took place on 7 February 2014. Eleven days later, the Maidan revolution in Kyiv reached its bloody climax. Within two weeks, Russian forces, many of them shifted south through the same Black Sea coast that had once held the Circassian deportation camps, were occupying Crimea.
What Ukraine recognized
On 9 January 2025, Ukraine's parliament voted to recognize the Circassian genocide. The resolution passed 232 to zero, with no abstentions. Ukraine became the second country in the world to do so, after Georgia in 2011.
Ukraine Parliament condemns Russian Empire’s Circassian genocide that killed and exiled 90% of population
The resolution names the perpetrator (the Russian Empire), the victims (the Adyghe people), and the period (1763 to 1864). It calls on Russia to recognize the crime and apologize. It calls on other countries to do the same. It affirms the right of Circassians to return to their lands and to self-determination. It instructs Ukrainian institutions to teach history.
The Ukrainian co-author of the resolution, MP Oleksiy Honcharenko, framed it as part of a broader project: condemning what he called Russia's colonial policy across centuries and across name changes—Muscovite, imperial, Soviet, post-Soviet. Ukraine had previously recognized the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria as occupied by Russia in 2022 and the Ingush right to self-determination in 2024. The Circassian resolution sits in that sequence.
The International Circassian Association, the Moscow-recognized body operating in Russia, condemned the recognition. The Association said the Circassian people had no need of such recognition from "illegitimate Ukrainian authorities." Circassian organizations in the diaspora—in Turkiye, Syria, Jordan, the United States—welcomed it.
Why this matters now
The Russian state's response to Tuapse this week has followed a pattern. The first strike on 16 April was reported as an industrial accident. The black rain was attributed to local factory emissions. The oil slick was acknowledged only after satellite images were already circulating. After the third strike on 28 April, Putin commented for the first time, and only to assure Russians that the situation was under control. A journalist from the independent Russian outlet Kedr, reporting on pollution caused by the strikes, was briefly detained by police in Tuapse this week.
Erasure is the through-line. The 19th-century version was conducted with artillery and mass deportation. The 21st-century version is conducted with denial, censorship, and, in Ukraine since 2022, with the same tactics Russian forces used in the Caucasus: the destruction of food stores, the deliberate creation of conditions designed to make a population leave or die, the deportation of children to the imperial center for re-education. The UN's Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine has documented the pattern.
Most Western readers have never heard the word Circassian. The reason is not an accident. Russia spent 160 years removing the people, the language, the maps, the memory, and the bones, and then put a ski resort on top of the burial ground.
The smoke from Tuapse this week was visible from there.
