Romania Scrambles Fighter Jets Amid Russian Attacks Near Its Border

In another dangerous close call with Russia on a NATO border, Romania scrambled fighter jets overnight in response to Russian military actions very close to the Ukraine-Romanian border.

Romania’s Defense Ministry said Wednesday that it scrambled the fighter jets in response to a series of Russian drone attacks near the border. It confirmed two F-16 aircraft took off just after 2am local time from the 86th Borcea Air Base, which lies east of the capital of Bucharest.

The Romanian fighter jets were given a mission to monitor “the aerial situation.” The fighter jets returned to their base two hours later, and reportedly did not engage any targets or hostile cross-border threats.

There was a separate incident elsewhere in which Romanian authorities feared drone parts or debris may have fallen within Romania’s sovereign territory: 

Around the same time, Romania’s Tulcea County — which borders southern Ukraine’s Odesa region — was put on alert as Russian forces were said to have been carrying out drone attacks “against certain targets” near the NATO member’s border with Ukraine. Authorities did not specify where those attacks had taken place.

…“The Ministry of National Defence has ordered measures to conduct investigations in the field, in the vicinity of Plauru, to search for possible objects that have fallen on the national territory,” the defense ministry’s statement said, referring to a town located just 300 meters from the Ukrainian city of Izmail on the Danube River.

Romania has reported several times throughout the course of the war that drone debris fell on its territory. For example, last year in a very dangerous moment, Ukraine claimed that a Russian suicide drone attacked Romanian territory, something which Romania itself later rejected.

“This is yet another confirmation that Russia’s missile terror poses a huge threat not only to Ukraine’s security, but also to the security of neighboring countries, including NATO member states,” Ukraine’s foreign minister said at the time.

But this was widely seen as an attempt by Kiev to drag Romania directly into the conflict on its behalf: “The Ministry of National Defense categorically denies information from the public space regarding a so-called situation that occurred during the night of September 3 to 4 in which Russian drones allegedly fell on the national territory of Romania,” Bucharest had responded at the time.