Search teams are battling high waves on Romania’s Black Sea shore after explosions tore through a chemical tanker just outside the Danube’s mouth. The San Marino-registered Wine Trader, empty and bound from Tunisia, radioed fire alerts about 24 kilometres from Sulina. Authorities pulled five sailors from the water; seven of the dozen-strong crew have not been found.
Bucharest’s president, Nicușor Dan, linked the blaze to aerial drones and said a second chemical ship, the Yara J, had taken a similar hit the evening before inside Romanian waters. That crew snuffed the flames without casualties. Witnesses on nearby hulls told local outlets the Wine Trader appeared to absorb a pair of impacts near 07:00 before its upper decks burned.
Black Hawk aircraft and patrol craft remain on station. A Nato officer speaking to Reuters described the weapons that sparked fires on both tankers as Russian-made. Dan refused to name a culprit in public yet called strikes on merchant traffic near Romania and Bulgaria intolerable and promised a state response once investigators finish.
He huddled in Brussels with Bulgaria’s Rumen Radev and Nato’s Mark Rutte about thicker Black Sea defences and possible Article 4 talks among allies. Two days earlier drones damaged freighters off Bulgaria; one went down and eleven sailors vanished. Wire tallies put the ten-day toll along those coasts at more than twenty seafarers dead or missing.
The lane has grown vital as Ukrainian exporters shift grain and other civilian loads toward the Danube and western approaches after Russian raids on Ukrainian harbours. The Kremlin insists it aims at dual-use cargoes; Kyiv and Brussels call the pattern illegal attacks on civilian shipping and a dangerous widening of the war.
