Romania put four fighter jets into the air on the night of November 18–19, 2025, after a drone crossed about eight kilometres into its airspace along the Danube, during a Russian attack on Ukrainian infrastructure across the river. Two German Eurofighter Typhoons on NATO's enhanced air-policing mission scrambled from the 57th Air Base at Mihail Kogălniceanu at 00:25, five minutes after a RO-Alert warning went to residents in the north of Tulcea County, the defence ministry said in its Press Release No. 218 of November 19, 2025.
Radar first held the drone's signal for a few minutes on the run from Vâlcov towards Periprava and Chilia Veche, then lost it. The signal came back intermittently for about 12 minutes, from Colibași in the Republic of Moldova towards Foltești and on to the Oancea area, and at 00:59 a second RO-Alert went to northern Galați County. Two Romanian F-16s then scrambled from the 71st Air Base at Câmpia Turzii. The Eurofighters landed back at Mihail Kogălniceanu at 01:50 and the F-16s returned at about 02:30. No impact of any aerial vehicle on Romanian ground was reported, and the ministry said specialist teams stood ready to search the area.
And no one shot the drone down. Reporting of ministry spokesman Col. Corneliu Pavel's remarks to Digi24 that night said the jets had the green light to shoot it down but did not fire when its signal vanished. What the drone was, the ministry's own statement does not say outright: it records the crossing as happening "following the Russian air attacks in the vicinity of the river border with Romania", and no forensic identification of this drone has been published. Contemporaneous reporting of the night describes it as a Russian drone, part of the attack then hitting Ukraine.
The crossing came inside a much larger night. Ukraine's air force said Russia fired 476 strike and decoy drones and 48 missiles at targets across Ukraine overnight, an attack that killed at least 25 people in the western city of Ternopil. Poland, watching the same strikes near its own border, scrambled Polish and allied aircraft as a precaution and temporarily closed Rzeszów and Lublin airports so military jets could operate freely; no violation of Polish airspace was recorded.
The jets were flying under a law Bucharest had built for exactly this. Parliament gave final approval on February 26, 2025 to the law on control of the use of national airspace; after the Constitutional Court threw out challenges by far-right parties, interim President Ilie Bolojan promulgated it on May 19, 2025, and it entered into force on June 18, 2025 — in force for five months by the night of the scramble. Under Law No. 73 of 2025, an unmanned aircraft that illegally crosses the state border and flies in national airspace without authorisation "can be destroyed, neutralised or its control can be taken over" — matched to the level of threat, within the limits of international law, with the priority of protecting human life and destruction as the last possible solution. Allied and partner forces stationed in Romania may take such measures too, under the treaties and respecting Romanian law.
The decision to fire does not travel up to the president. The law puts the order for drone measures with the commanders of designated structures, and President Nicușor Dan explained it in plain terms in September 2025: there is "no need for approval from the president, the minister, or the chief of the General Staff — the decision lies with the commander in charge of guarding that particular area", taken case by case, because when you shoot at a drone, you risk causing collateral damage.
Romania shares a roughly 650-kilometre border with Ukraine, much of it the Danube, and Russian strikes on the Ukrainian ports opposite — Reni and Izmail among them — have spilled drones and fragments across it since 2022. The numbers have climbed sharply since that November night: at a parliamentary hearing on September 28, 2026, defence officials put unauthorised incursions since the invasion at 49, with 30 of them in the first eight months of 2026 alone.
That is why a radar track over Tulcea is also Washington's business. Romania hosts around 1,000 American troops, and Mihail Kogălniceanu — the base the German Eurofighters scrambled from that night — hosts the U.S. Army Garrison Black Sea and is a major American hub on NATO's eastern flank, where U.S. rotations serve under Operation Atlantic Resolve. The German detachment that answered that night flew NATO's enhanced air-policing mission from the base from the summer of 2025 until handing over to the RAF in April 2026. Every drone that crosses unanswered tests whether that sky is defended in fact, and not only on paper.
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