Dr. Dimitar Keranov,

MAkadSA, Bulgarian Institute for International Politics (BIIP)

In 2016, President Klaus Iohannis proposed a permanent NATO naval flotilla in the Black Sea. Bulgaria's prime minister, Boyko Borisov, rejected it. Instead of warships, he said, he would rather see “boats, yachts, tourists, peace, and love” on the water. That sentence was shorthand for everything that did not work between Sofia and Bucharest at sea.

Ten years later, at the NATO summit in Ankara on 7 and 8 July 2026, two documents were signed on the same day. The defence ministers of Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey extended the mandate of their Black Sea Mine Countermeasures Task Group to cover the protection of critical undersea infrastructure, meaning cables, pipelines and gas platforms. Separately, Bulgaria's defence minister Dimitar Stoyanov signed a memorandum with his Belgian and Dutch counterparts, Theo Francken and Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, for the transfer of seven mine countermeasures vessels to the Bulgarian Navy.

Nobody was talking about yachts. I write this as a Bulgarian who works on this region every day, and from that vantage point the change is hard to miss. The Romanian-Bulgarian relationship at sea has moved further in three years than in the previous fifteen. Our two societies have barely registered it.

From symbolic refusal to working structure

The Mine Countermeasures Task Group was created by memorandum on 11 January 2024, became operational on 1 July 2024, and has been activated ten times. Command rotates every six months between the three navies. Bulgaria took over on 9 July, and the Romanian minehunter Căpitan Constantin Dumitrescu is taking part in the eleventh activation during Exercise BREEZE 2026.

This is the only functioning military structure in our region generated by regional initiative rather than external pressure, and that matters more than its modest size. Romanian foreign minister Oana Ţoiu made the practical case for it in Ankara, welcoming the expanded mandate and noting that joint work by Bulgaria, Turkey and Romania has kept Black Sea grain shipping routes operational.

Both navies are also rebuilding at the same time, along mirrored lines. Bulgaria is building two 90-metre, 2,300-tonne corvettes at the MTG Dolphin yard in Varna to a design by Germany's NVL Group, under a contract signed in November 2020 worth roughly €503 million. The first, Hrabri, began sea trials on 11 November 2025 in Varna Bay; the second, Smeli, launched in December 2024, is expected in service this year. They replace Soviet-era Pauk-class corvettes from the 1980s. Romania received the patrol vessel Contraamiral Roman in July 2026, built in Turkey under the MILGEM programme, and is developing four further vessels with Rheinmetall, financed through the EU's SAFE instrument.

Why our security became indivisible

Since autumn 2023, Ukrainian vessels have used only Romanian, Bulgarian or Turkish territorial waters, and research estimates that around 90 percent of Ukraine's agricultural exports now depend on those routes. Add the Greece-Bulgaria-Romania rail corridor for military matériel, and the role of Mihail Kogălniceanu near Constanța as the principal logistics hub on NATO's eastern flank.

A significant share of global food security and allied military mobility now passes through the water between Constanța and Varna.

This is the context for the joint Maritime Security Hub. Ţoiu announced in June that Romania and Bulgaria had finalised the project, with operational centres in Constanța and Varna, designed to produce joint threat analysis, improved situational awareness and rapid information exchange, and open to other Black Sea states as part of the EU's approach to port security and submarine cables.

Moldova, and what we could learn there

Viewed from Chișinău, the Black Sea looks less like a coastline than an exposed neighbourhood. Moldova is not a coastal state, but it belongs to the same security environment, and the way we discuss it needs revision.

Moldova has absorbed sustained Russian hybrid pressure, including disinformation, electoral interference and energy coercion, and has held its democratic direction. Bulgaria has not been tested at that intensity, and I am not confident we would perform as well. Sofia and Bucharest have real expertise to offer on reform, energy diversification and cyber resilience. They should also study, systematically and without condescension, how a small republic defends its institutions under continuous attack. That knowledge belongs to the same Black Sea security picture.

Everything described so far is institutional, and the institutional gap between our two countries has nearly closed. Both entered the Schengen area fully and together in January 2025. On 1 January 2026 Bulgaria became the twenty-first member of the euro area. None of this was improvised under emergency pressure: it rests on the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Good Neighbourliness of 27 January 1992 and the Strategic Partnership Declaration signed in Sofia on 15 March 2023.

What has not closed is the gap between our states and our publics. We share roughly 630 kilometres of border, a similar recent history and increasingly aligned defence planning, but nothing like a comparable level of mutual knowledge. In the Bulgarian press, Romania still appears mainly as a transit route or a statistical comparison. The reverse is equally true. This is not a diplomatic problem and no intergovernmental memorandum will solve it. It is a problem of intellectual infrastructure, and it is precisely where governments cannot substitute for civil society.

Constanța and Varna are where that work has to start, and three things seem achievable within five years. A permanent Constanța-Varna format bringing together researchers, journalists and port officials, running alongside the official hub rather than inside it. An exchange programme for young analysts from Dobrogea and the Varna-Burgas region, designed to produce experts who can work professionally in both languages. And a civilian monitoring component on critical infrastructure resilience, complementing rather than duplicating what governments already do.

In 2027 we mark thirty-five years since the 1992 Treaty and twenty years since joint accession to the European Union. The security architecture of the past three years already shows what those anniversaries should mean. At state level the parallel phase is over: the mine countermeasures group, the emerging Maritime Security Hub, the mirrored fleet programmes and our shared role in Ukraine's sea and rail lifelines are all expressions of the same fact.

The problem is that our societies have not been told. If we close that gap, Romania and Bulgaria will not simply be two countries that happen to sit on the same coast. We will help decide what the Black Sea looks like in ten years.