According to sources cited by Interfax, the ships were carrying marines on a training mission, as well as food and fuel for the maintenance and repair base.
But he put his training to work, filling empty iron- and copper-ore ships with lime and selling it to mines that exported the ore (lime is used to neutralize acid used in mining).
As it turned out, that was a false alarm: one of the ships at the center of the media firestorm never left port and the other carried out a normal training mission in the Black Sea before quietly returning to base a few days later.