Bulgaria has ended the search for the missing crew of a cargo ship sunk by drones inside its exclusive economic zone in the Black Sea, with rescuers reporting no trace of the sailors.
The Togo-flagged Alfa Watan was struck in the early hours of October 6 about 70 nautical miles (130km) east of the coastal town of Byala. It suffered critical structural damage and went down in roughly three minutes, according to preliminary findings.
Rumen Nikolov, who co-ordinated the rescue operation out of Varna, said on October 7 that the search would not be resumed. Teams recovered an overturned lifeboat, three life rafts and pieces of the ship’s equipment, but no bodies and no drone debris.
A second cargo ship, the Palau-flagged Able, caught fire in the same attack. All 18 of its crew abandoned the vessel and were picked up by the Bulgarian ferry Dioscuria, two of them seriously injured. Both ships are owned by Turkish companies.
Prime Minister Rumen Radev, who called an emergency meeting of the Bulgarian Government, described the attack as a blatant violation of international and maritime law. He said there were no grounds to invoke Article 4 or Article 5 of the NATO treaty, because the strike took place in waters that are legally neutral even though they fall inside Bulgaria’s economic zone.
Sofia has not said who launched the drones. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said his navy had established with its Bulgarian counterparts that Russian sea and aerial drones carried out the attack, adding that Ukrainian forces were not operating in that part of the Black Sea.
The strike came a day after a Turkish-owned grain carrier sank off Romania following a drone attack that killed two crew members. Assaults on merchant shipping have multiplied since the summer as Russia and Ukraine target each other’s export routes, and shipping sources said this was the first such attack inside Bulgarian waters.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the situation in the Black Sea was increasingly worrying. “Commercial ships and innocent crews are being targeted, with lives already lost at sea,” she wrote on X.
The European Union has no naval mission in the Black Sea, although two member states now face there the sort of threat the bloc sent warships to counter in the Red Sea. The bloc’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, had already asked capitals for more warships in September while pressing for tougher action against Russia’s shadow fleet.
Radev said the attacks were seriously disrupting Black Sea shipping and driving insurance costs higher still. He warned that the war was widening geographically and raising the risk of a broader conflict.
