Romania announced on Saturday that it had shot down a second drone that violated its airspace within two days, in a sparsely populated area near the border with Ukraine.
Romanian President Nicușor Dan said the drone was brought down at approximately 8:30 a.m. local time, around 10 kilometers west of Sfântu Gheorghe in the Danube Delta.
Romania’s Ministry of Defense stated that the drone was detected by radar at 8:22 a.m., prompting the immediate deployment of two F-16 fighter jets to respond to the incident.
Authorities have not yet confirmed the origin of the drone shot down on Saturday, Reuters reports, as cited by RKS News.
A day earlier, Romania shot down a drone that had entered its airspace for the first time. Romanian prosecutors said the wreckage belonged to a Russian drone.
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Romania—a NATO member sharing a 650-kilometer land border with Ukraine—has reported around 30 cases of Russian drones violating its airspace during attacks targeting Ukrainian ports along the Danube River.
In May, a Russian drone crashed into a residential building in the city of Galați, near the Ukrainian border, injuring two people. It was the first time an attack struck a densely populated area in a NATO member state and caused casualties during the war in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Romania’s Chief of the General Staff, General Gheorghiță Vlad, said on Friday that Russian attacks in the area surrounding the Ukrainian port of Odesa have intensified ahead of the harvest season, increasing pressure on key energy and trade routes in the Black Sea.
