A Togo-flagged ship sinks off Byala after drones hit two vessels

A merchant ship has sunk in the Black Sea inside Bulgaria's exclusive economic zone, and the crew is missing. Prime Minister Rumen Radev said air and sea drones hit two ships at about 03:00 local time on Tuesday, 00:00 GMT, roughly 70 nautical miles, about 130 kilometres, off the coastal town of Byala. He called the attack a gross violation of international law. Ursula von der Leyen called it unacceptable. Moscow has made no comment.

The ship that sank is the Alfa Watan, Togo-flagged and Turkish-owned, a general cargo vessel reported to have been heading for Sulina in Romania. Radev said its cargo was not disclosed. It is not clear how many people were aboard. A Bulgarian vessel that reached the position found an overturned boat, rafts and life jackets. A search is under way. No survivor from the Alfa Watan had been reported by the time of the Reuters and BBC accounts.

The ship that stayed afloat

The second ship is the Able, Palau-flagged, also a general cargo vessel, and it was carrying grain. Bulgarian sailors took the crew off. Two were injured in a fire on board and sent for treatment. Of the rescued, eleven were Turkish and seven Indian, eighteen people in all. Vanguard, the British maritime risk firm, named both ships and placed both attacks inside Bulgaria's economic zone. That naming is the independent cross-check on the prime minister's account.

The split in outcomes is the operational fact. One crew is ashore, with two injured. One crew is missing, with debris on the water. Both ships were merchant vessels, not warships. One was carrying grain, which puts it in the class of traffic the Black Sea grain routes depend on. The other's cargo is unpublished.

Who fired is not in the public file

Radev did not name a perpetrator. The Reuters account noted growing concern about hybrid attacks by Russia as the Ukraine war continues, and it recorded that Moscow had not commented. Concern is not attribution. No wreckage of a drone has been publicly tied to a named force. No radar track has been released. The weapons described are air and sea drones, used together, at night, 70 miles offshore.

The geography makes the ambiguity sharper. Byala is on the Bulgarian coast. Seventy nautical miles out is still inside the exclusive economic zone Radev claimed, and outside territorial waters. A strike there hits shipping bound for Romanian and Bulgarian ports without entering either state's twelve-mile sea. Sulina, the Alfa Watan's reported destination, is the Romanian mouth of the Danube, a grain outlet. A ship sunk on the way there is a Black Sea shipping fact even if the flag is Togo and the owner is Turkish.

A separate incident sits next to this one and should not be merged with it. Romanian authorities said on Monday that two people had died in a fire on a ship in the Black Sea outside Romania's territorial waters. That fire has not been tied, in the public accounts, to the Tuesday drone strikes off Byala. Treating them as one event would invent a link the reports do not make.

What Bulgaria can and cannot do next

Bulgaria is a NATO member. A drone attack on merchant ships in its economic zone is the sort of incident that produces a North Atlantic Council discussion, a note to the alliance's shipping centre, and a change in guidance for masters. None of that recovers the missing crew. The search is the immediate act. The identification of the drones is the act that decides whether this remains a crime at sea or becomes a named strike in the Ukraine war's maritime file.

The numbers that are already fixed are small and grim. Two ships. Eighteen people rescued from one of them, eleven Turkish and seven Indian, two of them hurt. One ship on the bottom. A crew whose size is not yet public, missing, 70 nautical miles off Byala, with rafts and life jackets on the surface and no confirmed survivor.