Drones struck two ships off Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast, the country’s prime minister said on Tuesday, in the latest in a string of attacks near Nato’s territorial waters that have frayed nerves in the region.
Six crew members were rescued and 10 others are missing, according to Bulgaria’s defence minister Dimitar Stoyanov, after it went down 30km east of the village of Krapets having sent a distress signal.
Bulgaria’s prime minister Rumen Radev acknowledged that it was not clear who had launched the drones but said in a statement that “logic suggests that the outcome benefits the Russian Federation” and that he had summoned Moscow’s ambassador to seek an explanation.
The uptick in drone strikes on the Black Sea, including attacks on ships in Romanian waters, comes as Russia steps up threats to Nato’s eastern flank and seeks to sow division among Ukraine’s allies.
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“The Black Sea has become another front of escalation of the Russian war in Ukraine,” said Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. “This is unacceptable.”
One of the ships attacked off Bulgaria’s coast sank, Radev said. Six people were rescued from its crew, according to Lyubomir Nikolov, the Bulgarian interior ministry’s chief secretary. He did not provide details on the whereabouts of the other crew members.
Radev said the other vessel was “in the immediate vicinity of Bulgaria’s territorial waters” when it was struck by three aerial drones. The ship, known as the Chelsea 3, was sailing under Malta’s flag but registered in Odesa, a large port city in Ukraine. Its crew of seven Ukrainians and eight Azerbaijanis were rescued and taken to a Bulgarian port, Radev said, where five received medical treatment.
The strikes are under investigation, and “we do not have clear and conclusive evidence to attribute responsibility,” Radev said. However, he summoned Russia’s ambassador to Bulgaria, Eleonora Mitrofanova, for a meeting on Tuesday that lasted less than an hour.
A readout of the meeting, released by the Bulgarian government, cited Mitrofanova as saying she did not have any information from Russia’s defence ministry about the recent spate of drone strikes in the Black Sea.
She suggested that a third party might have been involved, and Radev told her that “there is no logic for Ukraine to destroy its own ships,” according to the readout.
Russia has not commented on the strikes off the Bulgarian or Romanian coasts.
Radev said he would ask allies to help with Bulgaria’s air and sea surveillance, as well as its response to future threats. Nato officials are already on alert; warnings were recently issued to commercial shippers transiting the Black Sea.
Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, said the military alliance would respond as needed with deterrence and defence measures.
“We have already strengthened our posture along the eastern flank and will continue to monitor the security environment,” Rutte said in a statement on Tuesday.
Ukraine’s foreign minister Andrii Sybiha said on X that the strike “once again demonstrates Moscow’s deliberate disregard for civilian lives”.
“The Black Sea is a lifeline for global food security. Russia is attacking it to weaponise hunger and hold the world hostage,” he said.
More than four and a half years into the war that Moscow launched with its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Black Sea shipping has increasingly been drawn into a prolonged battle of economic endurance.
Ukraine and Russia are both among the world’s largest exporters of grain.
Russia has been bombing Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, forcing Ukraine to rely increasingly on river ports on the Danube and shipping routes close to the coasts of Nato members Bulgaria and Romania.
Ukraine, for its part, has increasingly targeted Russian grain-exporting ships in other parts of the Black Sea and the Azov Sea at the mouth of the Don River.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
