The war just knocked on NATO's door. Drone attacks struck two commercial vessels roughly 80 nautical miles off Bulgaria's Black Sea coast on Tuesday, sending one ship to the bottom with its crew still missing at sea.
The Togo-flagged general cargo vessel Alfa Watan sank after the strike, and a search is underway for its missing crew. The second ship, the Palau-flagged Able — which was carrying grain — caught fire but its crew was rescued, with two sailors injured. Both vessels sent distress signals around 4 a.m. local time; by 9 a.m., the Alfa Watan had vanished from Bulgarian Border Police radar.
Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev convened an emergency meeting with state institutions on Tuesday morning and made a televised statement, calling the attack "a gross violation of international law." He stopped short of naming who was behind it — but warned the war is spreading.
"If this war is not brought to an end in time, it will continue to expand its geographical scope and increase the risk of even a global conflict," Radev said. "We are seeing the war intensify, with all the rules of international law now being violated and civilian vessels being attacked at sea. This is absolutely unacceptable."
Shipping sources say this appears to be the first such attack inside Bulgarian waters — meaning the first drone strike on commercial shipping inside a NATO member's exclusive economic zone. British maritime risk group Vanguard confirmed both vessels were hit within Bulgaria's economic zone.
Who did it? That part is deliberately murky. A maritime security source told reporters that initial assessments suggested the attack was probably Russian — but that is one source's assessment, not an established fact, and Radev himself did not name Russia, referring only to Russia's war in Ukraine. Moscow has not commented.
The timing is impossible to ignore. Just a day earlier, Romanian authorities said two people died in a fire aboard a ship in the Black Sea outside Romania's territorial waters — an incident Ukraine's president blamed on Russian drones. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, European countries have reported Russian drones breaching their airspace and mines drifting across Black Sea trade routes.
For now, Bulgaria is searching for the missing sailors and scanning for environmental damage from the sunken vessel. But the bigger question hangs over the Black Sea: if commercial ships inside NATO waters are now fair game for whoever launched those drones, what comes next — and who is willing to answer for it?