ATHENS – Greece's defense minister said Tuesday that a military sea drone reportedly carrying explosives that was discovered on a Greek island last week is Ukrainian-built, describing the incident as a threat to Mediterranean Sea navigation and an “extremely serious issue."
A fisherman on the island of Lefkada found the craft inside a coastal cave on May 7 and towed it close to a nearby harbor. It was moved a day later to a naval base on the mainland for inspection and the explosives were later destroyed, according to Greece’s public broadcaster, ERT.
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“We have certainty now that it is a Ukrainian USV,” Greek Defense Minister Nikos Dendias said, referring to the drone as an unmanned surface vehicle.
Ukrainian authorities didn’t immediately return a request seeking comment.
Dendias made the remarks in Brussels at a meeting of European Union defense ministers, saying that he would raise the issue with his European colleagues and with the Ukrainian officials directly.
“You understand that the presence of that USV — the drone, the sea drone — affects the freedom of navigation and affects also the security of navigation,” Dendias said. “This is an extremely serious issue.”
Ukraine has used surface drones to attack Russian naval vessels in the Black Sea, and more recently to target tankers used to transport Russian oil as part of an illicit network when returning empty as part of a campaign to hammer Moscow's energy exports.
Greek authorities gave no further details of the drone, while Greek naval experts said that its features resemble Ukrainian Magura-type craft — a platform developed by Ukraine's intelligence service.
Lefkada, off the west coast of the Greek mainland, is on a busy waterway between Greece and Italy, and is popular with tourists traveling by yacht or ferry, as well as commercial vessels. “It appears that the (drone) suffered some malfunction and was moving in an uncontrolled way,” Stefanos Gikas, a Greek deputy minister for maritime affairs, told public television on Monday. “So this craft — a black thing without navigation and carrying explosives — could have struck a tourist vessel.”
The heightening drone-led confrontation between Ukraine and the invading Russian military has led to multiple incidents on the territory of NATO and EU member states — the incursions mostly involving suspected Russian drones entering their airspace.
“They are violating our airspace. And it’s very clear that inside the European Union we should rearrange our capacities, our capabilities, in order to decrease this type of violations,” Romanian Defense Minister Radu-Dinel Miruța said in Brussels on Tuesday.
“It is very important to understand that this is a common threat,” he said. “It is happening on the entire eastern flank.”
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Lorne Cook reported from Brussels. Theodora Tongas contributed to this report.