Black Sea mines raise worries
ISTANBUL — Turkey and Romania have scrambled in recent days to neutralize potentially explosive mines, amid concerns that weapons may be drifting across the Black Sea from Ukraine’s shores toward neighboring countries.
Defense ministries from both countries, in separate announcements Monday, said they dispatched their naval forces to defuse mines of unknown origin that appeared near their coasts.
A mine that appeared Monday was the second reported in the waters near Turkey in two days. Turkey’s government previously said it was in contact with both Moscow and Kyiv about the weapons, but did not specify which side if any was responsible for the mines.
The government of Bulgaria last week had also warned people living in three districts near its Black Sea coast to beware of possible drifting mines, according to local media reports.
The scramble comes after Russia’s intelligence service, the FSB, claimed on March 19 that poor weather had caused more than 400 naval mines to become disconnected from the cables anchoring them, and warned that the mines were “drifting freely in the western part of the Black Sea,” which includes the territorial waters of Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey.
Ukraine at the time dismissed the assertion as untrue and politically motivated.
“This is complete disinformation from the Russian side,” Viktor Vyshnov, deputy head of Ukraine’s state-run Maritime Administration, told Reuters. “This was done to justify the closure of these districts of the Black Sea under so called ‘danger of mines.’”
The Washington Post was not able to independently verify either side’s allegations.
A 1907 international treaty prohibits countries from floating unanchored mines designed to damage ships when they come into contact with them, unless they can be controlled or are “constructed as to become harmless one hour at most after the person who laid them ceases to control them.”
The Romanian defense ministry said Monday that a fishing vessel had spotted a drifting mine around 8 a.m. local time and alerted maritime authorities, which then undertook an operation to neutralize it some 39 nautical miles from the Port of Midia, in southeast Romania. The ministry did not say where the mine came from and an update on the operation was not immediately available.
Meanwhile, Turkey said Monday that it neutralized a mine detected off the coast of Igneada, a town in the country’s northwest near the border with Bulgaria. On Saturday another mine, which was thought to have drifted from the Black Sea, forced a temporary closure of the Bosporus, a key waterway that runs through Istanbul.
The incident raised fears that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine could threaten traffic in the Bosporus, a choke point for global energy supplies and commerce.