Three maritime drones struck a container ship sailing in the Black Sea off the coast of Bulgaria on Wednesday, the country's defense minister said, the latest in a string of such incidents on NATO's eastern flank
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The Higher Regional Court in Düsseldorf has ordered two 19-year-old Germans held pending extradition to Bulgaria, which accuses them of setting fire to Starlink antennas at a satellite ground station near Sofia, the court and Düsseldorf prosecutors said on 29 October. The men, from Duisburg and Moers, were arrested on 23 October, German prosecutors told Reuters.
As Russia presses its war on Ukraine, Starlink keeps Ukraine’s drone units and front-line troops connected, and its ground sites in Europe have become targets. Within a month, fires and attempted fires hit Starlink sites in Poland, Bulgaria, and Lithuania, and Warsaw and Vilnius have linked them to Russia. The Bulgarian case now has its first arrests, and Sofia says the same pair struck another EU country, which would make it more than a one-off.
Bulgarian Interior Minister Ivan Demerdzhiev said he expected both suspects to be handed over to Bulgaria, and that the same two carried out a similar attack in another EU member state on 18 October, the state news agency BTA reported on 28 October. He did not name the country outright, but went on to cite Lithuania’s prime minister on an attempted arson there.
Overnight on 18 October, intruders tried to set fire to a Lithuanian company that stores Starlink equipment used by Ukraine, but tipped-off guards foiled the attempt. Lithuania’s prime minister called it part of Russia’s hybrid war.
Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev said the suspects had been detained in Germany several days earlier, and that disclosing their names sooner would have let them flee. The opposition wants to know whether a foreign security service warned Bulgaria at least a week before the attack, and how two 19-year-olds could enter the country and leave unnoticed. Parliament has failed three times to gather a quorum for a sitting to hear Radev and the security chiefs.
The two did not agree to a simplified extradition, and the court will rule later on whether handing them over is admissible, according to the court’s statement carried by the dts news agency. Any extradition is to be approved only on the condition that, after a final sentence, they are offered a transfer back to Germany to serve it. Their lawyers plan to contest the Bulgarian warrant, dpa reported.
Bulgarian prosecutors say the pair crossed from Serbia as tourists on 9 October, set fire to eight antennas at the Plana teleport south of Sofia, and drove back to Serbia the same night. They were charged in absentia, a Sofia court confirmed European arrest warrants for them, and they face three to 12 years in prison if convicted.
Sofia City prosecutors announced the arrests on 27 October and said German authorities are gathering evidence for the case under a European investigation order. The pre-trial investigation continues, they said.
On Sunday (1 November) Bulgarians vote in a presidential runoff. The question that will outlast the result is not who wins, but whether the winner is willing to say no to prime minister Rumen Radev.
Radev spent nine years as president with Iliana Yotova as his vice-president.
He resigned in January to enter party politics and the office passed to her automatically; she has never been elected to it.
In April his Progressive Bulgaria coalition won 131 of parliament’s 240 seats, and it now backs her for a full term.
In the first round she led Andrey Gyurov, a former caretaker prime minister backed by the pro-Western opposition, by fewer than three points. Turnout was 22 percent – the lowest on record.
An elected majority is legitimate; so is cooperation between government and president. The constitutional risk begins where cooperation becomes an expectation of loyalty. An institution can keep every legal power and still lose the will to use it against political allies.
In Bulgaria those powers are modest but real.
A president can send a law back, and parliament must debate and vote on it again in public. Radev’s majority can pass it a second time with 121 votes, but the second vote is on the record.
A president can also refer a law to the Constitutional Court, commands the armed forces, and chairs the Consultative Council on National Security, where the state assesses threats to itself.
None of this can stop a determined majority. All of it can force one to explain itself.
Meanwhile, since the start of October, at least seven merchant ships have been hit by drones off the Bulgarian and Romanian coasts.
Both governments suspect Russian involvement, although responsibility has not been conclusively established; more than two dozen sailors are dead or missing.
The first strike in Bulgaria’s exclusive economic zone came on 6 October. By then Yotova had been president for nine months without once convening the security council. She convened it the next day, after the opposition demanded it in public.
It condemned the attacks and endorsed better surveillance and counter-drone defences: the right decisions, taken after the pressure rather than before the risk.
Her legislative record points the same way.
Yotova knows how to use a veto: in February she returned an Electoral Code amendment that limited the number of polling stations in countries outside the EU, calling it unconstitutional.
That parliament was not Radev’s. Against his majority the test came in July, with the 2026 budget. The reformist and conservative opposition, the Podkrepa trade union and a petition with more than 32,000 signatures asked her to return it. Y
Yotova argued that a veto would deepen financial uncertainty and promulgated the budget. On 20 October, the Constitutional Court upheld the budget as a whole but struck down two provisions inserted through it. The challenge came from MPs and the ombudsman, not the presidency.
One policy dispute between the candidates concerns Article 4 of the Nato treaty. Gyurov wants Bulgaria to request consultations with its allies. Yotova initially opposed invoking it, but later acknowledged that coordinated action with other allies remained an option.
Radev ruled it out on the day of the first attack because the ships were struck outside Bulgarian territorial waters. Yet Article 4 does not require an attack on national territory; it applies whenever an ally considers its security threatened. Whether to invoke it is a political choice. Territorial eligibility is not the obstacle.
The test of an independent presidency is not whether it agrees with the government on Article 4. It is whether it would demand a public account of what the state knew, what it did and what went wrong, and publish it even when it embarrasses the people who put it in office.
The European Commission’s rule-of-law report in July noted that most of Bulgaria’s regulators had their mandates renewed without becoming any more independent. A renewed mandate is not proof of oversight. Neither is a convened council.
The same test applies to Gyurov, an independent nominated by the reformist parties We Continue the Change and Democratic Bulgaria, who told CNN on 23 October that Bulgaria needs a counterweight to its government. A counterweight that only ever pushes against Radev is a faction, not an institution. A president elected by the opposition would have to challenge the opposition too.
EU leaders condemned the attacks at their 15–16 October summit, and Nato has announced additional maritime patrol aircraft, radar systems and drones.
Both are entitled to a clear account of what Bulgaria saw, when it acted and what failed.
Brussels, for its part, should judge institutional independence not by formal procedures, but by whether those institutions are willing to challenge those in power. The question to ask is simpler: when did it last contradict the government?
Radev has a mandate to govern. The next president will hold a separate one: to question, to return, to refer and, when necessary, to refuse.
Europe does not need a Bulgaria that pretends it never makes mistakes. It needs one that can find and correct them before its sailors, its neighbours and its allies pay for them.
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