Speaking on the sidelines of a Friday EU summit in Brussels, Romanian President Nicușor Dan told an interviewer that drone strikes on cargo vessels had underscored why NATO needed a stronger foothold in the Black Sea — a body of water he described as unlikely to be secure before the fighting in Ukraine ends — and he expressed an expectation that the alliance would provide both the support and the operational capacity to bolster protections there, given what is at stake economically for Ukraine and the broader region.
Drone violations of the country's airspace had been occurring for roughly eighteen months, Dan noted, adding that authorities had not been adequately prepared to handle them. Dan noted that the country faces a comparable readiness gap along its eastern flank, describing the Black Sea as an area where the same vulnerabilities apply and where territorial waters require protection. He also conveyed that he views continued backing from US President Donald Trump — covering both Black Sea security and Romania's standing within NATO — as a mutually advantageous arrangement, given what he described as the country's strong geographic positioning for extending military reach into other regions.
Remarks from Trump about reducing troop numbers and reconsidering how defence assets are positioned across Ukraine and Europe formed the backdrop against which that assurance took shape.
Quarterly summits of EU heads of state drew leaders to Brussels for this gathering, with the agenda running across support for Ukraine, the bloc's next long-term budget cycle, and a trade gap with China that has been widening. Tensions over naval and maritime safety in the Black Sea had grown to a point where both Dan and Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev placed security concerns near the top of their shared agenda.
Speaking to reporters after the summit, Dan conveyed that France had committed to providing what he described as "necessary equipment" and to gaining a clearer picture of Romania's operational needs in the Black Sea region, adding that while fresh obstacles continued to arise, the country was not without its network of allied partners.
A three-way meeting brought the two leaders together with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, with the gathering focused on ways to bolster support amid the worsening conditions. During the talks, anti-drone systems and combat aircraft were among the defence capabilities Bulgaria put forward as formal requests.
Rutte told reporters that NATO would press ahead with bolstering its presence along the alliance's eastern flank, with counter-drone capacity among the areas earmarked for expansion. He posted on X that the alliance would keep working alongside member states in the Black Sea region, adapting its deterrence and defence arrangements as circumstances required. The remarks came against the backdrop of a sustained pattern of Russian strikes on Ukrainian port infrastructure along the Black Sea and the Danube River, which has pushed Ukraine to route its grain exports to African and Middle Eastern buyers through other channels, leaving maritime routes through European waters open to potential incidents.
Unmanned aerial vehicles struck cargo ships navigating Black Sea waters near the Bulgarian and Romanian shorelines on each of the three days running up to the Brussels gathering, with further attacks having occurred throughout the week before that. One ship went down following drone strikes in the preceding week, with two crew members losing their lives in the incident.
As of the time of reporting, officials in both Sofia and Bucharest had stopped short of formally attributing the attacks to Russia. Speaking to reporters earlier that week, Radev put forward the view that the fatal strikes stood to benefit the Kremlin more than any other party, while also making clear that no conclusive evidence had yet come to light. Each of those cases remains under active investigation.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters after Thursday's talks with European leaders that an invasion does not require boots on the ground to take place. Zelenskyy went on to say that drone incursions into the airspace of Romania, Poland, and Germany had already been documented, and that a device was recovered at an airport in Leipzig, framing these episodes as part of a broader pattern in which Russia appeared to be gauging how European nations would respond to such boundary violations — with the Black Sea also among the areas he referenced.
One matching drone turned up on German soil. Two other nations — Moldova and Bulgaria — experienced the same disruption. Zelenskyy and other senior Ukrainian officials have pointed to Russia as responsible for a number of these events, with the most prominent case being a drone strike that hit a grain-carrying vessel near the Bulgarian coastline and resulted in fatalities.
