Romania has said a drone crashed in the east of the country in the early hours of August 20 after entering national airspace close to the border with Ukraine, with two Spanish fighter jets scrambled to track it.
The Ministry of National Defence said its radar surveillance systems detected a group of aerial targets near the Ukrainian border at 2.23am local time. Two F-18s of the Spanish Air and Space Force took off to monitor the situation.
An IAR-330 SOCAT helicopter of the Romanian Air Force was also sent up on a reconnaissance mission. The National Military Command Centre asked the emergency services to warn residents in the affected area and a RO-Alert message went out at 3.20am.
A drone entered Romanian airspace at 3.21am about 13 kilometres east of the city of Galați, the ministry said. Three minutes later the helicopter crew reported that the target had come down roughly four kilometres northeast of Grindu, in Tulcea county, in an unpopulated area.
The impact set off a fire that burned itself out, and no casualties or material damage were recorded, according to the ministry. A team of soldiers was sent to secure the site and the air alert was lifted at 3.52am.
The ministry did not say where the drone had come from or who had launched it. The crash came as Russia pressed a sustained bombardment of Ukrainian port infrastructure on the Danube, directly across the water from Romanian territory.
On August 16 a Spanish F-18 shot down a drone that crossed into Romanian airspace from the direction of Moldova, about 24 kilometres north of Galați. Debris was later located between the villages of Băleni and Cudalbi.
Acting defence minister Radu Miruță told Romanian broadcaster Digi24 on August 17 that Romania had tracked more than 100 drones across seven attacks on the Danube ports in recent days. He said Ukrainian forces had destroyed most of them within a few dozen metres of Romanian airspace.
Romanian F-16 pilots downed three drones in the space of three days in late July, the first such engagements by the country’s own air force. President Nicușor Dan described the repeated breaches as inadmissible and intolerable.
In May a drone hit a block of flats in Galați and injured a woman and her child. Bucharest summoned the Russian ambassador over what it called an extremely serious incident.
Romania is a member of both the European Union and NATO and shares a land border of about 650 kilometres with Ukraine. Its airspace has been breached dozens of times since the Ukraine war began in February 2022.
