Romania said on Saturday that its air force had detected a Russian drone in the country’s air space, days after Western officials condemned an incursion of Russian drones into Poland as an escalation of the war in Ukraine.
The defense ministry of Romania, a NATO member, said in a statement that the country had deployed two F-16 aircraft shortly after 6 p.m. local time to monitor Russian airstrikes on Ukrainian infrastructure near the Romanian border. About 20 minutes later, they detected the drone in Romanian airspace .
Romania’s foreign minister, Oana-Silvia Toiu, said on social media that the Romanian Air Force tracked the Russian drone in the country’s airspace for 50 minutes before it left without causing any damage or casualties. She called the intrusion “unacceptable and reckless.”
The defense ministry said the drone had not flown over populated areas or posed an imminent danger to people’s safety.
As of Sunday morning, the Russian defense ministry had not responded publicly to the Romanian comments.
The brief incursion occurred days after more than a dozen Russian drones entered Polish airspace, prompting NATO to scramble fighter jets to shoot some of them down.
The incident in Poland last week was the first time in NATO’s history that alliance fighters had engaged enemy targets in a member’s airspace, officials said. It prompted Poland’s government to invoke Article 4 of the NATO treaty, a rarely used mechanism that is triggered when a member is under threat and prompts a formal discussion within the alliance.
Russia denied targeting Poland and said that its drones had gone off track after their navigation systems were jammed.
“There were no targets marked on Polish territory,” Vasily Nebenzya, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, told a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Friday. He also claimed that Russia’s drones did not have the capacity to reach Polish airspace, which is false.
In a social media post about the apparent Russian drone incursion into Romania on Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that the Russian military “knows exactly where their drones are headed and how long they can operate in the air.”
“This cannot be a coincidence, a mistake, or the initiative of some lower-level commanders,” he added. “It is an obvious expansion of the war by Russia — and this is exactly how they act. Small steps at first, and eventually big losses.”
Jin Yu Young reports on South Korea, the Asia Pacific region and global breaking news from Seoul.
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