SOFIA — Bulgaria has asked NATO for combat aircraft and anti-drone systems to cover a stretch of the Black Sea where its own prime minister says he cannot prove who is behind the attacks on ships. Euronews reported that the request was made during talks in Brussels with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte.
Prime Minister Rumen Radev heads a government that announced in June it would stop sending weapons to Ukraine. He has said that “logic” would suggest the Kremlin stood to benefit from the attacks, then named the weak spot himself. “The problem is that we cannot prove it,” he said, according to Euronews.
The caveat matters because the damage is not in dispute. Drones hit ships off the Bulgarian coast on October 6 and again on October 13, and a vessel sank each time, by the Kyiv Independent’s account. The count of the dead is where the sources part.
Euronews says two seafarers were killed when a vessel sank last week. The Kyiv Independent reports ten crew presumed dead from the Alfa Watan, which sank on October 6, and eleven missing from the HS Dignity, which sank on October 13. Rescue operations for the missing were halted on October 14 because of strong winds, reduced visibility and high waves, TRT World reported.
Moscow’s on-record response is short. Russia’s ambassador to Sofia, Eleonora Mitrofanova, said she had received no information from Russia’s defence ministry about attacks on commercial vessels and suggested a third party could be responsible as a provocation, according to the Bulgarian government’s account carried by TRT World. TEH found no Kremlin or Foreign Ministry comment on the NATO request in the sources it checked by Saturday. Moscow and Kyiv have separately traded rival tallies of Black Sea ship attacks, and neither count is verified.
Analysts split on Radev’s caution. Dimitar Keranov of the German Marshall Fund called it a “convenient deflection,” while Ruslan Stefanov of the Center for the Study of Democracy in Sofia considers waiting for proof reasonable, the Kyiv Independent reported.
Romania’s president, Nicușor Dan, told Euronews that Bucharest was “not prepared” when drone incursions began about a year and a half ago. “At the Black Sea, we are in the same situation,” he said. Rutte wrote on X that NATO would keep “adjusting our deterrence and defence posture as needed.”
Bulgaria is not starting from zero. TEH reported in August that it had taken delivery of Axon counter-drone systems, and Defence Minister Dimitar Stoyanov has said Sofia expects to join a NATO anti-drone initiative by October 30, per TRT World. The open question in Sofia is what would turn “logic” into evidence, and what the jets are meant to stop if it never does.
