By Luiza Ilie
BUCHAREST, July 24 (Reuters) – A Romanian F-16 fighter jet shot down a drone that had entered its airspace on Friday, President Nicusor Dan said, the first time the NATO member state has done so following a series of such incursions.
Dan did not specify the origin of the drone and said an investigation was underway.
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.”
Poland and the Baltic states have also suffered such incursions, fuelling concerns that NATO’s borders are at risk.
Earlier, President 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.
JETS SCRAMBLED
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 kilometres (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 prefect of Buzau County 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.
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 and Gareth Jones)
