By Solomon "Customs" Bridges
A NATO fighter jet shot down a drone over Romanian territory near the border with Ukraine, the latest in a string of incidents in which unmanned aircraft have drifted, or been steered, into alliance airspace from the war next door, CBS News and Al Jazeera reported.
Romania's Defence Ministry did not say who sent the drone, though officials have blamed Russia for similar incursions in the past. The intercept came the same day Russian strikes killed a Ukrainian woman elsewhere in the country, according to Al Jazeera.
None of this is new, exactly. Romania and Poland have each scrambled jets before to deal with wayward drones and, in one case last year, missile debris that fell on Polish soil. What is new is the frequency. Each incursion forces the same quiet calculation in Brussels and Bucharest: how much airspace violation is tolerable before it becomes an attack, and who decides.
For now, the alliance's answer has been controlled and unspectacular — shoot down the drone, log the incident, say little else. That restraint is itself a policy choice, one aimed at keeping a grinding war in Ukraine from becoming a shooting war between Russia and NATO. But restraint has a shelf life. Every incursion tests it a little further, and every villager under a NATO flight path now lives, whether they signed up for it or not, a few minutes closer to a war they didn't start.
[Note to editor: original source material did not specify the exact date or location within Romania of the intercept; these details should be confirmed before print if available.]
Nothing happens 'over there' anymore.
— Compiled from reporting by CBS News and Al Jazeera.
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