Yesterday, Thursday, October 15, the Wine Trader, a chemical tanker flying the San Marino flag, was struck by drones while at anchor off the Romanian coast in the Black Sea. Eight crew members remain missing, and the vessel, which was heading for the Romanian port of Sulina near the border with Ukraine, caught fire according to MarineTraffic.
This marks the seventh ship attacked off the coasts of Romania and Bulgaria since the start of the month.
– According to the Financial Times, the Wine Trader and the Yara J, another chemical tanker flying the Comorian flag, were within Romanian territorial waters when they were attacked.
– This would thus represent a clear escalation compared with previous strikes and an affront to Romania’s sovereignty, a NATO member country.
Russia is suspected in all of the vessel attacks recorded since October 1, and has been accused by Kyiv in several of them. Yesterday, Thursday, October 15, Romanian President Nicușor Dan told Brussels: “It is evident that these are attempts by Russia, in Romania and Bulgaria, aimed at destabilizing our societies and weakening the support for Ukraine.”
In most cases, however, Russian responsibility is difficult to prove: the following day he acknowledged that he could not “technically say, for the moment, that they are Russians.”
– Europe has seen a marked rise in Russian hybrid attacks since September.
– The review notes 23 incidents involving drones and other aircraft in European airspace or near it, 7 drone attacks against merchant ships in the Black Sea, 6 sabotage operations (including 2 suspected and 4 unattributed), 3 fires, and one presumed interference.
– Moldova, Romania and Poland, three countries bordering Ukraine, account for 24 of these 40 actions, and Bulgaria counts 5.
The attacks on merchant ships off Bulgaria and Romania are part of the continuation of the war that Russia has been waging since 2022 against port infrastructure and Ukrainian grain exports. These vessels had been relatively spared outside Ukrainian waters since Ukraine, in the summer of 2023, established a corridor along the coasts of NATO countries, but they are now being targeted on an unprecedented scale.
– Russia’s freedom of action in the Black Sea now covers only about 25% of the maritime combat space, essentially a band roughly 25 kilometers wide along its Caucasus coast, compared with nearly 90% in February 2022.
– If the Russian Navy’s capacities are significantly reduced, Moscow can still strike port infrastructure and ships with missiles and drones launched from the ground.