Romania shoots down third Russian drone as tensions rise over airspace violations

Romania shot down a third Russian drone on July 26, and the aircraft was downed over or near its Black Sea territorial waters, around 12 kilometers northeast of Sulina. Romanian F-16 jets were scrambled as the country responded to the latest breach, and President Nicușor Dan called the repeated violations “intolerable.”

The strike came after two earlier incidents in rapid succession. Romania said it shot down a drone that breached its airspace on July 24, then reported a second drone shot down on July 25, turning what began as an isolated violation into a three-day pattern along NATO’s eastern edge. Romania also had found suspected drone fragments after a Russian attack on Ukraine in November 2025, evidence that spillover from the war had already begun reaching Romanian territory before the July escalation.

The latest incursion pushed both military and diplomatic responses. Romania summoned the Russian envoy in Bucharest after the drone was brought down, a move that showed the government treating the incident as more than a border nuisance. The sequence of shootdowns and the envoy summons made clear that Bucharest was no longer simply tracking stray drones from the war next door; it was responding to repeated violations of sovereign airspace near the Black Sea.

That matters because Romania sits on one of NATO’s most exposed front lines, where Russian attacks on Ukraine can quickly create risks for alliance territory. Even when drones do not appear intended for Romania, the effect is the same from Bucharest’s perspective: airspace has been violated, military pilots have been launched, and the risk of miscalculation rises with each crossing. The July 24 incident was described as the first time Romania had shot down a drone after an airspace incursion, making the July 25 and July 26 interceptions a sign that the response threshold had already tightened.

With three drones downed in three days, Romania’s posture had shifted from monitoring to active defense. The repeated incursions, the use of F-16s, and the diplomatic summons to Moscow underscored a narrower tolerance in Bucharest for cross-border violations and a growing test for NATO deterrence on the alliance’s southeastern flank.