Eight crew members remain missing after a fire was declared on the merchant ship Wine Trader, flying the flag of San Marino, while sailing in the Black Sea, near the Romanian town of Sulina.
The Romanian Minister of the Interior has communicated that "forces and intervention resources have been mobilized to manage the emergency situation" and to try to locate the missing crew members. The operation involves the Border Police, the General Aviation Inspection, and the General Emergency Situations Inspection.
The aerial deployment includes two Black Hawk helicopters. The first, with medical personnel on board, has headed directly to the disaster area to provide support from the air, while the second has taken off from Bucharest to reinforce search and rescue tasks.
In the maritime operation, two emergency vessels have been incorporated: the ship Fifi, which has set sail from the port of Mangalia with a doctor, two paramedics, and a medical assistant, and a multipurpose vessel from the General Emergency Situations Inspection of Tulcea, which has departed for Sulina with three paramedics and four crew members.
At the same time, a boat from the Romanian Border Police remains in the area to supervise the situation and support the teams already deployed.
The bad sea conditions, with strong waves and adverse weather, currently prevent carrying out rescue maneuvers with the necessary safety, so the teams in the area are waiting for an intervention window that does not compromise their integrity.
The Ministry of the Interior has emphasized that the absolute priority is to rescue the sailors alive without endangering the mobilized personnel. "The deployed resources and personnel act in a coordinated manner, depending on the evolution of the situation and the conditions in the incident area," the department stated in its communication reported by the Romanian public television TVR.
Explosion on an oil tanker after drone impact
In parallel, another ship was hit by drones this Wednesday in the waters of the Black Sea, about nine nautical miles from Sulina.
This is the oil tanker Yara J, loaded with crude oil, which suffered an explosion after the impact, according to the private news agency Mediafax. In this second incident, Romanian authorities have confirmed that all the sailors, of Syrian nationality, have been rescued.
Hours earlier, the captain of a ship flying the Comoros flag and with almost twenty crew members on board had reported a drone attack during the night of Wednesday when it was anchored in Romanian waters of the Black Sea, in the anchorage area of the port of Sulina.
The captain of the Yara J alerted by radio that the upper part of the vessel had been hit by a drone and that a fire had been declared on board, after which the Maritime Coordination and Control Center immediately sent an alert to the Romanian Maritime Salvage Agency, which responded with a rescue ship, according to TVR.
If confirmed that this is a drone attack, it would be the first vessel impacted in this way in Romanian territorial waters. However, for now, Romanian authorities have avoided officially corroborating this hypothesis.
In this regard, the Minister of Defense, Radu Miruta, has stated to the Digi24 network that, "whether it was hit by a drone or not, an investigation is being carried out to verify these facts," although "the radars of the National Defense Ministry did not detect any drone heading towards this vessel."
Even so, "this is a matter of great gravity (...) in Romanian territorial waters," emphasized Miruta, who added in the same statement that the rescue ship "has returned" to port, as the crew of the ship has reported that "the fire has been extinguished, that they do not need assistance and that they also do not wish to enter port."
Both incidents have taken place near the Romanian coast of the Black Sea, an area where authorities have emergency resources deployed to address the consequences of the two incidents.
Spanish fighters activated in NATO mission
While Defense has avoided confirming or denying that the origin of the incident was the impact of a drone, it has indicated on social media that, during the night, its radar surveillance system "detected a group of aerial targets offshore, in the Black Sea," after which "two F-18 aircraft from the Spanish Air and Space Forces deployed at Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base 57" took off as part of NATO's Enhanced Air Policing mission with the Paznic Detachment.
In addition, Defense has collected the sending of a RO-Alert message past 8 PM (local time) after "two aerial targets penetrated national airspace." "Subsequently, radar contact was lost with one of the targets over the sea, while the other left national airspace at 8:13 PM, heading towards Vâlcove, Ukraine," adds the publication.
This latter "continued towards Reni, Ukraine, with a potential trajectory towards the city of Galati, so a new RO-Alert message was issued for the east of Galati County at 8:33 PM," indicated the Ministry, which emphasized that, ultimately, "the target was shot down by Ukrainian air defense in the area of the locality of Reni, north of the Chilia arm" of the Danube River, which marks the eastern border between Ukraine and Romania.
Although it is not the first episode with drones in Romanian airspace since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an attack against a vessel anchored in Romanian territorial waters would represent a jump in the level of alert, in an already tense context between Bucharest and Moscow after a summer in which the Romanian president, the pro-European Nicusor Dan, ordered the Russian ambassador to be summoned after the Prosecutor's Office concluded that a drone shot down by Romanian defenses was a model used by the Russian Army in the war against Ukraine.