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Two Spanish F-18 fighter jets, which were already on alert as a precaution, received authorisation to intervene at 04:44 on Sunday morning. The drone was sighted 24 kilometres north of the town of Galati.
The drone, whose origin has not been confirmed by the Romanian authorities, was intercepted and destroyed between the towns of Baleni and Cudalbi, in the south-east of the country, in an area close to the border with Moldova.
The defence minister congratulated both the Spanish pilots and the Romanian military personnel in charge of the command centre. In his message, Miruta stressed that Romania “is defending its airspace” and that it has the backing of its allies, which he described as a tangible security guarantee based on vigilance, rapid response and solidarity among the countries of the Alliance.
The minister emphasised that Romania is on the front line of the European Union’s defence, a position he attributes to the roughly 614 kilometres of land border the country shares with Ukraine.
The incident also comes after another night of exchanges of attacks between Russia and Ukraine. Russian bombardments triggered large fires in Kyiv, with at least two people injured, while Moscow claimed it had been targeted by more than 600 drones launched by Kyiv, leaving three people wounded on Russian territory.
A string of incidents on the eastern flank
This latest incident adds to a long list of incursions recorded in recent weeks in Romanian airspace.
Last Thursday, two Spanish F-18s had already taken off from the Mihail Kogălniceanu base after an airborne object was detected near the river border with Ukraine, a drone that spent around 12 minutes in Romanian territory before returning to Ukraine, forcing the authorities to send an SMS alert to residents of Tulcea county.
A day later, while a drone crashed in Romania after crossing the country’s airspace undetected by radar because it was flying at very low altitude, tensions were also mounting in the Baltic, where allied fighter jets shot down another drone over Latvian territory.
At the start of the month, another unidentified device exploded in Bulgarian airspace, near the border with Romania, after entering from Romanian territory.
The most serious precedent dates back to 29 May, when a Russian drone struck a residential block in Galati, sparked a fire and injured two people, in what the Atlantic Alliance at the time described as an irresponsible escalation by Russia.
The NATO secretary-general, Mark Rutte, reiterated at the time that the organisation is ready to defend every inch of allied territory against this type of threat.