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Prime Minister Rumen Radev convened an emergency session of Bulgaria’s Security Council after drones struck two merchant ships overnight within the country’s Black Sea economic zone, an area that falls outside territorial waters but remains under Bulgarian jurisdiction for resource rights. One vessel sank near the village of Krapets while the Malta-flagged Chelsea 3 was damaged by three aerial drones approximately 18 nautical miles off the town of Byala, according to a statement Radev posted on social media. Bulgarian authorities confirmed that the attacks occurred around 1:30 a.m. local time and described them as absolutely unacceptable given their proximity to the coastline.
All 15 crew members aboard the Chelsea 3 were rescued and transported to the port of Varna, where five received treatment for minor injuries, Balkan Insight reported. The ship, which is Ukrainian-owned and registered in Odesa, had been sailing from a Turkish port to Romania with seven Ukrainian nationals and eight Azerbaijanis on board. Radev’s office said border police units responded promptly to the distress call issued by the vessel’s crew.
A separate vessel struck near Krapets sank shortly after the assault, leaving five crew members rescued and 11 others missing, according to multiple accounts compiled by Reuters. Bulgarian officials have not yet released the name of the sunken ship though some local media identified it as the Azov Concord managed by a Turkish company. The Maritime Administration Executive Agency has deployed search vessels to the area as efforts continue to locate the remaining sailors.
Radev stated that while Bulgaria lacked solid evidence to assign blame to either Russia or Ukraine, the logic of the attacks suggested they benefited the Russian Federation, a position he repeated during the Security Council briefing. The prime minister announced that he would summon Russian Ambassador Eleonora Mitrofanova for consultations later in the day and planned direct talks with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte. Bulgaria’s permanent representatives to both NATO and the European Union have been instructed to brief those organisations and request enhanced surveillance capabilities in the Black Sea.
The incidents represent the second wave of drone strikes on commercial shipping in Bulgaria’s economic zone within a week, following an October 6 attack that sank another vessel and left most of its Syrian crew unaccounted for, a Reuters dispatch from that period showed. In the earlier strike, which occurred about 70 nautical miles offshore, one ship was lost while the second sustained damage but remained afloat with its crew evacuated. Bulgarian officials have maintained contact with Ukrainian counterparts throughout both sets of attacks though they have stopped short of endorsing Kyiv’s attribution of responsibility solely to Moscow.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asserted in a public address that joint analysis by Ukrainian and Bulgarian naval forces pointed to a combined Russian operation using sea and aerial drones, according to coverage by the Kyiv Post. The Russian embassy in Sofia issued a statement denying that its forces had targeted either vessel hit on October 13 and called for a full investigation before any conclusions about the drones’ origin, Bloomberg reported. These events have intensified concerns over the security of Black Sea shipping routes that remain vital for global grain exports more than four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.
