Fresh oil started pouring from a stricken Russian tanker in the Black Sea on Friday, said officials in Moscow, as Ukraine warned of "terrible environmental consequences" from the spill.

An oil tanker that burned for weeks in the Red Sea after being attacked by Yemen's Houthi rebels and threatening a massive oil spill has been salvaged, a security firm said Friday. The MV Sounion tanker had been a disaster-in-waiting in the waterway,

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Emergency workers toiling to clean up an oil spill in the Black Sea have detected seven new slicks, a Russian official told the TASS state news agency on Friday, as authorities struggle to mitigate the effects of the nearly month-old disaster.

An oil tanker that burned for weeks in the Red Sea after being attacked by Houthi rebels and threatening a massive oil spill has been salvaged, a security firm said Friday, after months of work.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that more needed to be done to clean up an oil spill in the Black Sea, saying efforts so far appeared to have been insufficient to deal with the ecological disaster.

The Black Sea is home to different cetacean species — some endangered — and it was the site of an oil spill in the middle of December that killed 31 of them.

The Sounion had been a disaster in waiting in the waterway, with 1 million barrels of crude oil aboard that had been struck and later sabotaged with explosives by Yemen's Iranian-backed Houthi rebels.

The recovery of the oil tanker Sounion, which was attacked and badly damaged by the Yemeni Houthi militia in the Red Sea last year, has been successfully completed, according to a security service provider.