Romania says it shot down second drone breaching its airspace

BUCHAREST, July 25 - Romania said on Saturday that it had shot down a second drone breaching national airspace in as many days over a sparsely populated area near the border with Ukraine.

The first drone, which Romanian prosecutors investigating the fragments said was Russian, was shot down by the NATO state on Friday, the first time it has done so after dozens of airspace breaches.

President Nicusor Dan took to social media to say the second drone had been shot down at 8:30 a.m. (0530 GMT), 10 km (6 miles) west of Sfantu Gheorghe in the Danube Delta.

The defence ministry said the airspace breach had been spotted by radar at 8:22 a.m., and two F-16 fighter jets had been scrambled.

It did not specify the origin of Saturday's drone; prosecutors said the drone downed on Friday had been Russian.

Romania, which shares a 650-km (400-mile) land border with Ukraine, said Russian drones had breached its airspace around 30 times since Moscow began attacking Ukrainian ports across the Danube River after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In May, a Russian drone crashed into an apartment building in the southeast Romanian town of Galati, near the Ukrainian border, injuring two people. It was the first time a strike had hit a densely populated area in a NATO country and caused injuries during the Ukraine war.

On Friday, General Gheorghita Vlad, the Romanian army's chief of staff, said Russian attacks on the region around the Ukrainian port of Odesa had increased ahead of the harvest season, further pressuring key energy and trade routes in the Black Sea. REUTERS