Bulgarian search opens after a cargo ship sinks in a Black Sea drone strike

A civilian cargo ship has sunk in the Black Sea and its crew is missing after a drone attack inside Bulgaria's exclusive economic zone, Prime Minister Rumen Radev said on Tuesday. A second ship, loaded with grain, was hit the same night about five nautical miles away. Bulgarian sailors took its crew off, including two people hurt in a fire on board. Eleven of those rescued are Turkish and seven are Indian. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen called the attacks unacceptable.

Radev said air and sea drones were used at about 3 a.m. local time, 11 p.m. GMT, some 70 miles off the coastal town of Byala. The sunken ship is the Alfa Watan, Turkish-owned, flying the flag of Togo, and reported to be heading for Sulina in Romania. MarineTraffic showed her entering the Black Sea heading north on Monday. Her last reported position was at 23:43 GMT inside the Bulgarian zone. Her cargo was not confirmed. The second ship, the Able, flies the flag of Palau and was carrying grain. Radev called a strike inside Bulgaria's economic zone a flagrant breach of maritime law. "Such an attack within the Bulgarian exclusive economic zone is absolutely unacceptable," he said.

A separate sinking off Romania

The Bulgarian account is not the only one from these nights. On Monday, Romanian authorities said the Turkish-owned Royad Mammadov, flagged in Saint Kitts and Nevis, caught fire and sank in Romania's exclusive economic zone after leaving the Ukrainian port of Izmail with grain for Italy. Eleven crew were rescued. Two died. Citizens of Azerbaijan and India were among those on board. The site was about 20 nautical miles from the Romanian coast and about nine nautical miles south-east of OMV Petrom's Pescarus offshore platform. President Volodymyr Zelensky said two Russian drones hit the ship. Romanian officials confirmed the fire, the sinking and the deaths, and did not at first name a weapon or a state.

The two cases should not be folded into one. Different ships, different flags, different economic zones, a day apart. What they share is a civilian hull, a Turkish owner or operator, grain or an undeclared cargo, and an Indian sailor among the people taken off or still missing. India's external affairs ministry had not, by Tuesday afternoon, published a count of nationals on the Able or on the Royad Mammadov.

The grain route and the platform

Ukraine has moved grain out of the Danube mouths and Odesa-area ports since the main Black Sea corridor came under repeated attack. Sulina, the Romanian arm of the Danube delta, is one of the exits. A ship bound there, sunk off Bulgaria, is on that route. The Pescarus platform detail in the Romanian case puts a commercial gas installation nine nautical miles from a hull that Zelensky says was struck by drones. Romania has not said the platform was a target. The proximity is now part of the incident report.

Bulgaria has opened a search for the Alfa Watan's crew. No names had been released by early afternoon. The Able's 18 rescued sailors, 11 Turkish and seven Indian, are the identified survivors of Tuesday's pair of strikes. Von der Leyen's comment registers the attacks as a European Union concern because they fell inside a member state's economic zone. Attribution, in the Bulgarian statement, is to drones. Radev did not name the operator of those drones in the remarks carried on Tuesday morning.

An exclusive economic zone extends 200 nautical miles from a coastal baseline. It is not territorial sea. Ships in it are not in a foreign port, and an attack on one is not an attack on land. It is still a use of force against a civilian vessel in waters where the coastal state has resource rights and a duty to render help. That is the legal frame Radev used when he called the Byala strikes a breach of maritime law. Bulgaria's search-and-rescue service is the body now looking for the Alfa Watan's crew. Romania ran the equivalent operation a day earlier for the Royad Mammadov, with 11 people recovered and two dead.

Indian nationals appear in both crews. Seven were taken off the Able. At least one Indian was reported among the Royad Mammadov's company. The ministry in Delhi has a standard consular drill for this: confirm names with the flag state and the owner, then with the rescuing navy. None of those names were public on Tuesday. Until they are, the figure that can be printed is the one Radev gave for the Able, seven Indian, eleven Turkish, two of them injured, and a missing crew on the Togo-flagged hull whose size has not been stated.