Drones hunt ships in NATO waters: two vessels struck off Bulgaria, one sunk, crew missing

Black Sea, Oct 6: The war came for the merchant ships on Tuesday morning. Two commercial vessels were struck by drones inside Bulgaria's exclusive economic zone in the Black Sea, in what appears to be the first reported drone attack on shipping in the waters of a NATO member state. The Togo-flagged Alfa Watan, en route from Istanbul to Sulina, and the Palau-flagged Able were hit at the exit of the Sulina Canal, east of Cape St. Atanas and some 80 miles off the town of Byala in the Varna district. Distress signals went out at around 4 am local time. By 9 am, the Alfa Watan had vanished from the Bulgarian Border Police radar and sunk. None of its crew has been recovered, and a search-and-rescue operation is continuing. The Able fared little better. A fire engulfed the ship after the strike, forcing all 18 crew members to abandon it. They were picked up by the Bulgarian ferry Dioscuria, which diverted from its Constanta to Varna route, and transferred to a Bulgarian Border Police vessel for evacuation ashore. Some of the rescued crew sustained injuries, and two severely injured sailors were flown to hospital. The Saint Kitts and Nevis-flagged cargo vessel Mercy joined the rescue effort, along with Romanian Coast Guard vessels and a helicopter. Bulgaria's Prime Minister Rumen Radev convened an emergency meeting with the defence, interior, transport and environment ministries, the presidency and the security services, and was due to address the media later in the day. The origin of the drones remains unknown, and no state has been publicly blamed for Tuesday's strikes. But they came just a day after another vessel, the Royad Mammadov, was sunk near Romania in an attack Ukraine blamed on Russia. The pattern is unmistakable: commercial shipping in the Black Sea is now being hunted, and the war's front line has crept into the economic waters of a NATO country. For the crews who sail these lanes, the abstraction of geopolitics ended at 4 am on Tuesday. Someone's sons and brothers are missing in cold water tonight because the sea they worked on has become a battlefield. The question for Europe is no longer whether the war will spill over. It already has.