Romania is counting drones, not incidents: 25 airspace incursions in nine months

At ten past two in the morning, the radars of the Romanian border service picked up a group of aircraft approaching the northern part of Tulcea county. Ten minutes later, mobile phones in those villages received a message through the RO-Alert system: objects may fall from the airspace, take shelter in cellars or in civil protection shelters.

Those without a shelter were told to stay indoors, away from windows and outside walls. The warning lasted around ninety minutes. Ninety minutes awake, in the dark, phone in hand - on the territory of a NATO and European Union member state.

The numbers that are no longer an incident

The night before, Russia carried out a large air attack on Ukraine with 166 drones, more than half of the Shahed type jet-powered. The main targets were Odesa and the Kyiv region. Tulcea is across the river from that target - which is exactly why the siren goes off there so often.

Romanian defence institutions recorded 67 Russian attacks near the border and 25 unauthorised drone incursions into national airspace up to 7 September this year. Since the start of the war the number of such incursions stands at 43, with four drones shot down. That means more than half of all violations happened in this year alone.

When a phenomenon repeats 25 times in nine months, it stops being an incident and becomes a condition. And there is nobody to name the condition clearly - because naming it demands a response, and a response demands a decision nobody wants to sign.

This border is not far away

Between Tulcea and the Balkans there is neither a border on another continent nor a translator. Romania neighbours Bulgaria and Serbia, and the same airspace being violated there is part of the same defence system we are in. Would a message like that arrive here at two in the morning - and has anyone even prepared one?

The night ended without casualties. That is the good news. The bad news is that "ended without casualties" is now a sentence Romania writes several times a month.