NATO said it was “ready to defend every inch of Allied territory” after a Russian Shahed-type suicide attack drone entered European Union airspace and hit an apartment block in Romania, injuring two people.
Romania scrambled two F-16 fighter jets overnight to intercept a Russian drone entering its airspace but had just four minutes between detecting the strike and it crashing into the side of an apartment building in the south-eastern town of Galati, a spokesman said. Situated on the River Danube on the Romanian border where it meets the borders of Moldova and Ukraine in a three-way split, the region is a frequent target for Russian strikes given the river’s importance to the Ukrainian economy.
Previous Russian airstrikes on Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odessa and other cities up the Danube have come so close to the Romanian frontier that Romanian troops have observed drones landing on targets just 200 yards away from their positions. Romanian border villagers close to Galati, the scene of Thursday night’s attack, have already received new-built emergency bomb shelters from the Romanian military, so frequent is it that attacks land close to the border.
TOPSHOT – Police and forensic investigators examine the location of impact after a Russian drone struck an apartment building in Galati, eastern Romania. A Russian drone wounded two people as it struck an apartment building in NATO-member Romania, its defence ministry said on May 29, 2026, the latest spillover from the four-year war into neighbouring states. (Photo by Daniel MIHAILESCU / AFP via Getty Images)
Drones and missiles becoming ‘lost’ has become a not infrequent feature of the conflict given the efforts of warring parties using countermeasures and radio spectrum jamming to confuse and misdirect autonomous weapons, pushing them away from inhabited areas. Romania has not confirmed this attack on their territory was the result of countermeasures pushing the ‘Geran-2’ drone — the Russian-built derivative of the Iranian Shahed delta-wing drone — and other NATO members have previously accused Moscow of deliberately attacking them, but said it has launched an investigation.
Whether a lost weapon or not, the attack is an urgent matter. It is the first time a civilian on NATO territory has been injured by a Russian conventional weapon strike in the course of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, and per The Times of London it may be the first time it has happened in NATO’s 75-year history.
Romania’s President Nicușor Dan convened a meeting of the council for national defence on Friday morning to discuss the strike, stating he has alerted NATO of the attack and called on his fellow alliance members to move more defence systems to Romanian national territory, and said he’d complained to the United Nations Security Council. Calling the drone strike the “most serious incident” on Romanian territory of the war yet, President Dan said:
The unprecedented nature of the event requires a firm, coordinated and proportionate response – at the national, allied and international levels. I declare, with all firmness, that the full responsibility for this incident belongs to the Russian Federation… [due to] irresponsible and indiscriminate way in which Moscow operates these weapons systems in the immediate vicinity of NATO borders.
There has been some criticism of the government in Romania this morning for having failed to shoot down the drone before it hit a tower block, where it exploded and set the 10th floor alight, injuring two. Going some way to address this, President Dan said the Romanian military had full authorisation to shoot down the weapons but did not do so “because there were no conditions that would allow its destruction without the risk of significantly endangering the safety of the civilian population”.
This is a problem familiar from the Ukraine War where collateral damage from shoot-downs can be just as destructive as the strikes they were meant to intercept over built-up areas. The town of Galati is hard-up against the Ukrainian border and depending on attack vector there may have been no open land to bring it down on.
The spokesman for Romanian Joint Forces Command General Gheorghe Maxim said on Friday the military was constrained by legal requirements, including that its own interceptor weapons couldn’t risk straying into Ukrainian airspace, reports national broadcaster TVR Info. He said: “The first limitation we have is a legal limitation, namely the fact that we cannot fire in such a way that the projectile violates the airspace of a neighboring country. We know that Ukraine is at war, but Romania is in a situation of peace and we cannot launch a projectile that reaches the airspace of Ukraine”.
Local residents were warned to take cover before the impact. Romania’s Department of Emergency Response said in their statement on the attack that: “a drone crashed into a block of flats, the impact being followed by an explosion and the outbreak of a fire in an apartment located on the 10th floor”. They said two injured people were able to self-evacuate from the building and were taken to hospital. No further injuries or fatalities are known.
The civil defence organisation said the full explosive charge of the drone detonated, meaning there was no further explosives for the bomb disposal police to remove or detonate, and that temporary accomodation had been activated for those impacted by the blast.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte restated the alliance’s determination to protect its members and called on Russia to end the war. He said on Friday: “I affirmed that NATO stands ready to defend every inch of Allied territory. We will continue to enhance our readiness to deter and defend against any threat, including from drones.
“Russia’s reckless behaviour is a danger to us all. They continue to target civilians and civilian infrastructure across Ukraine. And last night showed yet again that the implications of their illegal war of aggression don’t stop at the border.”
As well as being a member of NATO, Romania is also one of the easternmost members of the European Union. Brussels boss Ursula von der Leyen said Russia had “crossed yet another line” and said: “We stand in full solidarity with Romania and its people. As we continue strengthening our security and deterrence, especially on our Eastern border, we will keep increasing the pressure on Russia. We are preparing a 21st package of sanctions.”