For Romanians living near the border with Ukraine, noisy phone alerts warning of “falling objects from the surrounding airspace” and other possible dangers had become so frequent and seemingly needless that many often set their phones to silent mode before going to bed.
Andra Lupsa, 38, had done so on Thursday night, but she was still woken up: Her husband’s phone, left on, started screaming shortly after 1 a.m. “I said to myself: ‘just another alert,’” she recalled. “I put my head back on the pillow.”
Moments later, she heard a loud bang as a Russian drone slammed into a nearby apartment building in the city of Galati, one of the largest urban centers in eastern Romania.
“You tell yourself it’s just another alert — that something like this can’t happen to us here,” Ms. Lupsa said on Saturday.
Like her neighbors, along with the Romanian government and officials at NATO, which Romania belongs to, Ms. Lupsa was struggling to understand how an annoying routine had suddenly become a potentially deadly threat.
Russian drones regularly pound Ukrainian ports and other facilities along the Danube River, which meanders between Romania and Ukraine. Debris often falls in tiny Romanian villages.
But until early Friday morning, a drone had never slammed into a residential block in NATO territory.
The drone hit the top of an elevator shaft on the roof, exploding on impact and blasting a hole through the ceiling of an apartment on the 10th floor where a 53-year-old woman and her 14-year-old son were sleeping. They were not hurt by the initial explosion but suffered serious burns when they fled through the flaming wreckage of their living room. Windows in the building’s upper floors were also blown out by the explosion.
Residents were ordered to evacuate after the fire broke out but had mostly returned by Saturday. Construction workers were still picking up debris and fixing damage on the top floor as police officers stood guard to prevent all but residents and laborers from entering.
While the physical damage is quickly being repaired, shock still lingers. Over everything hangs an unsettling question: Was the episode an accident, caused by a Russian drone driven off course by Ukrainian air defense systems? Or was it a deliberate strike, aimed at testing NATO’s defenses and its response to incursions into its territory?
In Galati on Friday, Romania’s president, Nicusor Dan, was unequivocal: The drone had hit by mistake. After visiting a hospital treating the wounded mother and son, Mr. Dan said in a television interview that the aircraft was part of a swarm of 43 Russian drones that had crossed Ukraine from the east.
Some of the drones were shot down, he said. But one of them was damaged by Ukrainian defenses above the Danube port town of Reni and changed its trajectory. It veered off toward Galati, just nine miles away, he said, and hit the city.
That matches what has happened in recent weeks in the Baltic region of Europe, hundreds of miles farther north. There, Russian air defense and electronic jamming systems have repeatedly changed the direction of Ukrainian drones targeting Russia. Knocked off course, those drones have accidentally strayed into Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, stirring alarm but causing no serious damage or casualties. All four countries are member of NATO and strong supporters of Ukraine.
But Dmitri Medvedev, a former president of Russia who is now a senior Kremlin security adviser, has suggested a more ominous scenario, hinting on Friday at the possibility of deliberate Russian action in retaliation for the West’s support for Ukraine.
Mr. Medvedev, who often delights in stirring panic in an effort to curb support for Ukraine, said in a message on social media that “citizens of EU countries” were paying the price after their leaders “unilaterally entered a war with Russia.”
“So be vigilant and don’t be surprised by anything,” he warned. “The peaceful sleep is over.”
In Galati, Ionut Oanea, 39, a father of two girls who lives near the site of the drone impact, said on Saturday that he was still trying to understand what had happened. Jolted awake early Friday by his terrified children because of the phone alerts, he failed to go back to sleep and got out of bed.
Then, he said, he looked through his window and saw fighter jets that Romania had scrambled after the drones were detected.
“There were two planes, F-16s, flying over,” he said. “I could see them flying, I could hear the sound, I could see the light.”
“And then I heard the drone,” he said. “It was so close I couldn’t tell if it was above me or near me.”
He said he screamed at his wife to get up, shouting, “Drone, drone!”
“After I heard the drone, I heard a loud bang,” he recalled. “And then panic set in.”
Andrew Higgins is the East and Central Europe bureau chief for The Times based in Warsaw.
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