BUCHAREST — An F-18 fighter on a NATO air policing mission shot down a drone that illegally breached Romanian national airspace, the fourth unmanned aircraft shot down over the country this year, Romania’s defence ministry said on Sunday.
A spokesperson for NATO’s military headquarters, U.S. Army Colonel Martin O’Donnell, said the alliance is constantly on watch and prepared to defend itself from any threat.
“Additional details regarding Sunday’s incident remain under investigation, but the drone appears to be Russian,” he said. NATO member Romania shares a 381-mile land border with Ukraine and has reported repeated breaches of its airspace by Russian drones over the past four years, as well as mines floating in the Black Sea across key trade and energy routes.
Romania’s defence ministry did not specify the origin of the drone, saying it was detected by radar as it entered the country from neighbouring Moldova, north of the southeastern Romanian city of Galati.
The F-18 jet, part of a Spanish NATO contingent deployed in Romania, “made radar contact with the target and received permission to engage”, the ministry said in a statement, adding that the drone was shot down safely at 5:01 a.m.
The ministry said that fragments from the destroyed drone appeared to have fallen in an uninhabited area between two villages.
Moscow hit in Ukrainian strikes
Ukrainian drones struck Moscow region overnight on Sunday in what the provincial governor said was one of the largest attacks to have targeted the region, and which he said had left at least one person dead.
In posts on Telegram, Moscow region Governor Andrei Vorobyov said that an 83-year-old man had been killed, with several more injured in Podolsk, where he said a warehouse belonging to Russia’s largest online retailer Wildberries had been struck.
He said damage had been caused at several other sites, including at a warehouse in the town of Domodedovo, close to one of Moscow’s main airports.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said it had downed 822 Ukrainian drones throughout the country.
Video filmed by Reuters of the aftermath of the strike on Wildberries’ Koledino warehouse showed a large plume of smoke over the site, around 45 km (28 miles) south of Moscow.
Ukraine has been targeting Wildberries, which it accuses of handling military goods, in recent weeks as part of a wider bid to damage Russian economic infrastructure it sees as underpinning Moscow’s military campaign.
Russia attacks Kyiv overnight
Russian forces launched missile and drone attacks on Kyiv early on Sunday, sparking fires in at least two districts of Ukraine’s capital, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.
The city’s military administration said three people had been injured.
Klitschko, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said that falling debris had caused a fire in a non-residential part of a northern suburb.
Several cars were on fire and another fire had broken out in an area just south of the city centre, he said.
Reuters witnesses reported explosions in the city.
Tymur Tkachenko, Governor of the Kyiv region, reported that three more people, including a child, were injured as a result of drone attacks across the region.
Russia has in recent weeks been staging intensive air attacks on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities.
