Russian drone strikes Romanian apartment block, injuring two in Galați

Fear returned to the Stirex-Mazepa neighborhood in Galați as residents began going back to a 10-storey apartment block that was hit after a Russian drone crossed into Romanian airspace and slammed into the building’s roof. The strike, in the Danube port city in southeastern Romania near both Ukraine and Moldova, sparked a fire on the 10th floor and forced the evacuation of about 70 people. Two people were hurt, and AFP identified them as a 14-year-old boy and his 53-year-old mother, both hospitalized with burns.

For people in the block, the attack was not an abstraction from the war across the river. One resident said the blast sounded like an earthquake, and that her dogs were alarmed by the noise and the flash of light. Mihaela Blanaru was among the neighbors describing panic, shock and disbelief as the phone alert came in and the impact followed. By the time firefighters and emergency crews reached the scene, the apartment block had become a reminder that the front line now ran uncomfortably close to ordinary homes.

Romanian authorities said the drone was tracked by radar before it crashed into the apartment building during a Russian attack on targets in Ukraine near the Danube border. Romania scrambled two F-16 fighter jets and a helicopter in response, and later called the incident a grave and irresponsible escalation. The Romanian Foreign Ministry asked NATO to speed up the transfer of anti-drone capabilities, a sign that Bucharest now sees the threat as more than a one-off breach. Romania’s 2025 law authorizing the military to shoot down unauthorized drones entering national airspace has added a legal tool, but the Galați strike showed how much depends on detection and interception before a drone reaches civilian housing.

The broader alarm was immediate. The United Nations said this was the first time since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 that a Russian drone had struck a residential building inside a NATO member state. NATO, the European Commission and the UN all condemned the attack and expressed solidarity with Romania. The Romanian Defense Ministry said the country had recorded 28 airspace breaches and 47 fallen drone fragments over four years of war, and officials also pointed to an earlier incident in April 2026, when a Russian drone crashed in Galați, hit a toolshed and caused no injuries. For residents on Romania’s eastern edge, the message was stark: the war has already crossed the border, and civilian life now depends on defenses that still arrive after the blast.