Drones strike two cargo ships off Bulgarian coast; one sinks, sailors missing

Drones struck two commercial ships in the Black Sea off the coast of Bulgaria on Tuesday, sinking one of the vessels, the Bulgarian government said.

The sailors aboard the sunken ship were reported missing, while the crew of the second ship was rescued, Rumen Nikolov, head of the local rescue operations in Varna, was quoted as saying by the BNR public radio.

Rescuers were scouring the area for the missing sailors about 150 kilometres east of the coastal city of Byala, the radio reported. The government said it would convene an emergency meeting later on Tuesday to discuss the strikes.

According to the specialist site Maritime.bg, the sunken ship was sailing under a Togo flag; the second vessel flew a Palau flag, with all 18 of its crew members evacuated by a Bulgarian ferry.

Tuesday’s strikes came a day after Romania reported that a grain ship had caught fire and run aground near its coast, killing two crew members, in an attack Ukraine blamed on Russia.

Turkey’s Chamber of Maritime Commerce said last month that 226 civilian and commercial vessels have been attacked in the Black Sea since the start of the war in Ukraine, the vast majority of them this year.