Bulgaria, Romania and Turkiye will sign a memorandum of understanding to set up a naval group to tackle increased mine threat in the Black Sea posed by Russia’s war in Ukraine, the defence ministry in Sofia said on Wednesday.
The agreement will be signed in Istanbul on Thursday, the Bulgarian defence ministry said a press release.
Turkiye initiated the creation of Mine Countermeasures Naval Group in the Black Sea (MCM Black Sea) in August 2023 with the aim of ensuring the safety of shipping lanes.Bulgaria’s government approved it in December.
In July, Russia withdrew from the one-year-old UN-Black Sea Grain Initiative, which had established safe sea lanes enabling exports of grains and ammonia from Ukrainian ports.
In October, the UK foreign office said that intelligence pointed to the potential threat of Russia using sea mines to target civilian shipping in the Black Sea in order to deter Ukrainian grain exports. Later in the same month, Bulgarian and Romanian ships began trawling Bulgarian and international waters on the route of the new Ukrainian sea corridor, Andrii Klymenko, head of the Institute of Black Sea Strategic Studies monitoring group, said in a social media post.
Source: seenews