Bulgaria will add seven minehunter ships to its navy under two agreements with Belgium and the Netherlands, Reuters reported. Parliament cleared the acquisition on 26 August, and the vessels are meant for a sea where mines have drifted since Russia invaded Ukraine. They will work within a three-country task force whose mission widened this summer beyond mine clearance.

Russia's invasion turned the Black Sea into hostile water for civilian shipping: mines drift out of the fighting, strikes fall on port after port, and grain leaves through whatever routes are still open. Mine clearance is the slow work that keeps those lanes usable at all, and every hull committed to it widens the area the navies bordering that sea can actually cover.

What parliament approved

Three of the hulls come through a sale the Netherlands agreed with Sofia, and they carry the gear for locating mines and mine-like objects and blowing them up. The remaining four arrive under a three-way handover deal signed by the two donor countries and the recipient, according to Reuters.

Before the three sale ships change hands, the Dutch will put their systems back in working order and raise how much they can do at sea. The bill for the yard work on all seven, up to the level the alliance requires, falls to the buyer. Alongside the ships, a signed memorandum provides for training the crews and supplying spares and extra kit.

Belgium and the Netherlands, together with the UK, handed Ukraine five mine countermeasure vessels in April, described at the time as the core of a future large-scale Black Sea clearance operation. 

A task force that grew

Bulgaria, Romania, and Türkiye signed the agreement creating a joint Mine Countermeasures Task Group in January 2024, and the group began work that summer. Three other states hold coastline on the same sea: Georgia, Russia, and Ukraine.

"Bulgaria is part of the mine countermeasures group established together with our colleagues from Türkiye and Romania, and it is working in excellent coordination to clear the maritime areas of the three countries," Bulgarian Defense Minister Dimitar Stoyanov said.

At a NATO summit in July, the three agreed to expand the force so it also protects critical infrastructure. Romania's national defense strategy had already flagged risks to Black Sea infrastructure.

Moldova will invest in air defense after repeated Russian drone incursions, Moldovan President Maia Sandu said, RFE/RL reported. She spoke at the country's independence celebrations on 27 August alongside the Ukrainian and Romanian presidents, hours after another group of drones entered Moldovan airspace during Russian strikes on Ukraine. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) says the crossings show Putin continuing to normalize the threat that Russia's strikes on western Ukraine pose to European states.

"We cannot be intimidated"

Russian drones have violated the airspace of Moldova and Romania dozens of times, Sandu noted. She met Romanian President Nicușor Dan and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Chișinău for the anniversary.

"And today, on the eve of our holiday, Russian drones invaded our airspace with the obvious aim of intimidating us. And now I want to say clearly, in the presence of our friends—we cannot be intimidated. We are investing in air defense in order to have the capability to protect our people and infrastructure," she said.

Sandu also called on every country of the free world to help Ukraine, and specifically to strengthen its air defense before winter. While Ukraine fights in the east, she said, Moldova can sleep calmly. Russian drones have breached Moldovan airspace repeatedly before this month.

Five drones from the Ukrainian border

Moldova's Defense Ministry reported five unidentified drones entering Moldovan airspace from various points along the border area with Ukraine in Odesa Oblast early on 27 August, the day after a single drone crossed the border and left minutes later. The five crossings ran from 03:56 to 06:02, and each drone flew over the country briefly before turning back toward Ukraine, following Russian air attacks there, the ministry said.

ISW says these incidents show that Putin continues to normalize the threat that Russia's strike campaign against the westernmost parts of Ukraine poses to European states, including Moldova and eastern NATO members. The crossings also show the Kremlin accepting the risk that its war can damage other states. 

Moldova is not in NATO or the EU, and it is a neutral state. Russian drones have crossed its airspace illegally around 70 times since the start of the full-scale war, Moldova's National Army says. Defense Minister Anatolie Nosatîi called the situation extremely serious after one incursion this month halted air traffic over the country for 15 minutes, and said the army needs modernizing.

Romania shoots, Bulgaria clears up

Unlike Moldova, the NATO members in the region act on what reaches them. Romania intercepts what crosses in, and Bulgaria destroys what drifts to its coast:

• 26 June: Bulgaria's navy destroyed a drifting drone seven nautical miles off Kranevo.
• 21 July: Bulgarian, Romanian, and Turkish ships destroyed a drifting drone 21 nautical miles off Ahtopol.
• 24–26 July: Romanian F-16s downed three drones, the country's first shootdowns at home.
• Early August: Romanian jets scrambled before Ukraine shot the drone down.
• 16 August: a Spanish F/A-18 downed a drone north of Galați, the fourth over Romania this year, the Defense Ministry said.
• 20 August: a Romanian F-16 destroyed an explosive-laden sea drone with its cannon near an offshore gas platform. President Nicușor Dan blamed Russia.
• 22 August: two more drone wrecks turned up on Bulgarian beaches, one of them a Russian decoy without a warhead.

Slovak police foiled a planned arson attack on a drone factory in the country's east, the force said on 25 August. Investigators charged three foreigners with preparing the attack on commission and seized incendiary material and equipment at the scene. The plant belongs to the Ukrainian drone maker Skyeton, Militarnyi reported.

Had the attack in Slovakia gone ahead, it risked a large fire, danger to life and health, and damage on a large scale, police stated. About 70 employees could have been in the building at the time, by preliminary estimates. Property inside the production hall is worth tens of millions of euros, according to the findings so far.

Officers seized a larger quantity of incendiary mixture, along with tools, mobile phones, an action camera, and a hand-made plan. The police Criminalistics and Expertise Institute gave a preliminary finding that the substance was a mixture of gasoline and polystyrene, commonly called napalm. Slovakia's anti-crime unit ÚBOK, part of the Police Presidium, identified the people preparing the attack and stopped it. Nobody was hurt and no property was damaged, police said.

The charges, and where the three were detained

An ÚBOK investigator charged the three foreigners with preparing a particularly serious crime of general endangerment, committed as co-perpetrators on order. Officers detained two of them in Slovakia, and the investigator moved to have both taken into custody. German authorities detained the third on a European arrest warrant. The investigation continues, and the legal classification of the men's actions may still change.

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The plant, and a company Russia has already hit

Slovakia, a NATO and EU member, borders Ukraine on its eastern edge. Skyeton builds the Raybird, a fixed-wing reconnaissance drone that has served with Ukraine's Armed Forces since 2018 and stays airborne for up to 28 hours. The company began production in Slovakia in 2024, and more than €10 million in foreign investment went into the plant, one of several sites Ukrainian firms opened abroad to cut the risk of Russian attacks.

That risk is not theoretical. Russia destroyed Skyeton's Kyiv office in May, and the company said it had already spread production capacity across Ukraine and abroad in anticipation.

A Skyeton representative told Militarnyi:

"The recent attempt on our production in Slovakia is another sign that Ukrainian arms makers are already a bone in their throat, which means we are on the right path." 

2024

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Arson against Ukraine's defense partners in Europe

Companies working for Ukraine have been hit across several countries this year and earlier. 

In March, suspects who claimed a pro-Palestinian motive set fire to the Pardubice production of Archer, a Ukrainian maker of thermal imaging sights, destroying nearly all of the company's capacity in Czechia.

Estonia opened a Russian-link investigation this month into a suspected arson at a military robot maker supplying Ukraine, and Lithuania charged six people in January over an attempt to burn a factory that supplied radio-wave scanners. 

A powerful explosion of undetermined cause hit EMCO, one of Bulgaria's largest private arms makers, which produces artillery ammunition for Ukraine, on 10 August.

A combat drone exploded near a village on Moldova's border with Ukraine on 9 August, sparking a grass fire but hurting no one, Moldovan police said. Investigators recovered fragments and will examine them to establish the drone's type and origin. It was one of two blasts the war pushed across Europe's borders in two days, with Bulgaria fielding a separate drone explosion and summoning Ukraine's ambassador.

A drone down in a Moldovan field

The blast rang out around 13:20 near Crocmaz, in Moldova's Ștefan Vodă district in the southeast, and set dry grass alight, NewsMaker reported. The village lies on the Dniester, upstream of Ukraine's Dniester estuary.

Firefighters and patrols confirmed no civilians were hurt and no homes were damaged. Police found fragments that they preliminarily identified as parts of a combat drone. Those pieces will undergo a ballistic-technical examination to determine the drone's exact type, its affiliation, and how it fell. Crocmaz sits right on the Ukrainian border. The district council posted photos of the object and told residents to avoid the cordoned area and report any fragments to the 112 line.

The blast came amid an assault on Odesa

The drone fell hours after Russia hit Odesa with missiles and drones overnight on 9 August. Much of Moldova's eastern border runs along Odesa Oblast, so wreckage from the war often drifts across. Russian drones have crashed on Moldovan soil during such attacks before. Whether this one was Russian or something else is for the examination to show.

A parallel case in Bulgaria

Also today, Bulgaria's Foreign Ministry summoned Ukraine's ambassador, Olesia Ilashchuk, over a drone that exploded on 8 August near the Romanian border, by a Trans-Balkan gas pipeline compressor station, Bulgarian National Television reported. Its defense bloc said the drone was likely a Ukrainian decoy, with no sign it was launched on purpose. 

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