By Luiza Ilie
BUCHAREST, July 24 (Reuters) – A Romanian F-16 fighter jet shot down a drone that had entered its airspace on Friday, authorities said, the first time the NATO member state has done so following dozens of such incursions.
Airspace breaches on NATO’s eastern flank have fuelled concerns that the alliance’s borders are at risk as war rages between Russia and Ukraine.
The Romanian army’s chief of staff told a news conference that Bucharest had not yet identified the origin or purpose of the drone and said an investigation was underway.
However, Chief of Staff General Gheorghita Vlad said it appeared to be a Shahed – the Iran-designed attack drones used by Russia against Ukraine.
“Visually, the pilots reported the drone looked to be a Shahed type,” he said, adding it was too soon to draw conclusions.
Earlier in the day an army source told Reuters: “There is an ongoing investigation to determine the origin of the drone. But in this part of the world it is Russia that is the attacker.”
JETS SCRAMBLED
Earlier, President Nicusor Dan wrote on social media platform X that a Romanian pilot had shot down the drone at about 11 a.m. (0800 GMT) after it entered the country’s airspace.
“The area was uninhabited, so the pilot was able to shoot without any risk. Currently, teams of the relevant institutions are investigating the area to come up with all the details about the incident,” Dan wrote.
The Romanian Defence Ministry said the drone was shot down near the town of Padina in Buzau county in the east of the country.
It said two Romanian F-16 jets and two Italian Eurofighter Typhoons based in Romania had been scrambled in response to the incursion, adding the drone was first detected by radars at 9:30 a.m. (0639 GMT) around 20 km (12 miles) east of Sulina on the Black Sea coast.
Fragments of the drone fell on a wheat field but caused no damage or injuries, the Buzau county prefect told reporters.
Romania, which shares a 650-km (400-mile) land border with Ukraine, has reported multiple breaches of its airspace by Russian drones since Moscow began attacking Ukrainian ports across the Danube River following its full-scale invasion in 2022.
General Vlad said Russian attacks against Ukraine’s Odessa region had increased ahead of the harvest season, further pressuring key energy and trade routes in the Black Sea.
In late May, a drone crashed into an apartment building in the town of Galati, near the Ukrainian border, injuring two people, the first time a strike had hit a densely populated area in a NATO country and caused injuries during the Ukraine war.
(Reporting by Luiza Ilie, Writing by Alan CharlishEditing by Tomasz Janowski, Gareth Jones and Toby Chopra)
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