After months of NATO talks, Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria have agreed to a joint initiative to clear the Black Sea of the hazard posed by floating mines resulting from the war in Ukraine.
Turkey’s Defence Minister Yaşar Güler and his Romanian counterpart Angel Tilvar along with Atanas Zapryanov, Bulgaria’s Deputy Defence Minister, signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to this effect in Istanbul yesterday (Thursday).
“With the start of the war, a threat of floating mines in the Black Sea has arisen. To combat it … we agreed to form a Black Sea mine counter-measures task group,” Güler declared.
Sea mines have threatened Ukrainian Black Sea export routes since the Russian invasion of February 2022. Several commercial ships have been hit since, among them a bulk carrier vessel that was heading to the River Danube port to load grain in December.
According to the Turkish defence ministry, each country will provide three mine sweepers plus one command control ship.
Naval commanders from the three countries will oversee the operation, Güler said, noting that other Black Sea states could join the initiative once the war in Ukraine ends.
Güler said Turkey considered potential contributions to the initiative by non-Black Sea NATO allies as “valuable” but stressed that the pact as it now stands is only open to ships of the “three littoral allied countries.”
Just last week, Ankara indicated that it would not allow two minesweepers that were donated to Ukraine by the UK to transit its waters en route to the Black Sea. To do so would be in violation of the 1936 Montreux Convention, an international pact concerning wartime passage of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits.
Defence ministers from the three Black Sea countries previously held talks on the proposed pact at a NATO meeting in Brussels in October last year and in Ankara in November. NATO has now hailed the outcome as “an important contribution toward greater freedom of navigation and food security in the region and beyond.”
Ankara, meantime, continues to work with the United Nations, Ukraine, and Russia to revive the Black Sea grain initiative which Moscow quit last year. However, to date, these talks have shown no public signs of progress.
