NATO fighter jet shoots down drone over Romania near Ukraine border
BUCHAREST, Romania — A NATO fighter jet shot down a drone over Romanian airspace early Sunday after the unmanned aircraft crossed in from neighboring Moldova, Romania's defense ministry said, in the latest sign of how the war in Ukraine keeps spilling onto alliance territory.
The ministry said a Spanish F-18 assigned to NATO air policing duties intercepted the drone shortly after dawn. Debris came down in an uninhabited area near Romania's border with Ukraine, and no injuries were reported.
Sunday's interception is part of a pattern that has become increasingly familiar for NATO air commanders: aerial targets entering alliance airspace from Ukraine or its neighbors, often attributed to electronic interference or coordinated jamming by Russian forces. At times, officials say, the drones belong to Ukraine but have been hijacked by Russian electronic-warfare systems.
Romanian authorities have recovered fragments of downed drones several times since 2023, particularly after Russian strikes on Ukrainian ports along the Danube River, just across the border. Last week, Ukraine denied involvement after a drone entered Bulgarian airspace from Romania and exploded near an international gas pipeline.
The shootdown also comes a month after Romania downed a drone for the first time since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, when an aerial target penetrated deep into the country, about 60 miles from the capital, Bucharest. In June, Latvia's military said two NATO fighters shot down a drone that had entered its airspace. Ukrainian drones have previously crashed in all three Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — with local officials attributing the incursions to Russian jamming and electronic warfare.
While the drones have caused no casualties, the repeated incursions are testing NATO's ability to monitor and defend its eastern flank without escalating directly against Moscow. Each incident has prompted visible shows of force but also quiet diplomatic efforts to manage the risk of miscalculation as alliance jets fly increasingly frequent sorties near the frontlines of the conflict.