Bulgaria has said it has no firm proof that Russia carried out the drone attacks that sank and damaged merchant ships off its Black Sea coast, though it has told Moscow’s ambassador in Sofia that its suspicions point that way.
Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev made the remarks on October 15 as he arrived at a two-day European Council summit in Brussels. He said his government had certain assumptions about who was responsible but would not assign blame while the investigation continued.
Radev argued that logic pointed to Russia as the party that stood to gain from the strikes. “We don’t believe that Ukraine will attack its own ships and crews,” he said.
He said he had summoned Russian ambassador Eleonora Mitrofanova over the incidents. Mitrofanova told him Russia’s defence ministry had no information about attacks on commercial vessels, according to the Bulgarian Government.
Two merchant ships were hit in Bulgaria’s exclusive economic zone during the night of October 13. The Guinea-Bissau-flagged HS Dignity sank with 11 crew members missing, while the Maltese-flagged Chelsea 3, which is Ukrainian-owned, was damaged by three drones.
Military experts who inspected one of the surviving vessels found no drone fragments. Radev said the Chelsea 3 would be towed to a Bulgarian port, where a full terrorism investigation would search for debris capable of establishing where the weapons came from.
The prime minister described attacks on civilian shipping as a flagrant breach of international law and of the law of the sea. Sofia had already asked the European Union and NATO for technical help in identifying the drones, after its own searches turned up nothing.
Radev said he would put a joint proposal to EU leaders with Romania, open to NATO member Turkey, for a moratorium on strikes against commercial vessels in the Black Sea. He added that he had spoken to the Romanian prime minister and would meet Romanian President Nicușor Dan before raising the plan at the summit.
The attacks were the second deadly sinking in the area in a week. On October 6 drones struck two other merchant ships in the same economic zone, one of which went down, a day after a Turkish-owned grain carrier sank off the Romanian coast.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the Black Sea “has become another front of escalation” in the Ukraine war, and that the EU stood with Bulgaria.
The strikes have revived questions about how far the European Union can protect shipping in the region more than a year after it adopted a Black Sea security strategy. Radev said the attacks had already driven up insurance costs and led some operators to refuse cargo bound for Bulgarian ports.
