| Date | 14 Dec 2023 |
| Tracker | European Airspace Violations |
| Type | Incursion |
A Russian drone violated Romanian airspace and crashed on Romanian territory. German and Romanian fighters were scrambled in response. Germany was at the time contributing to NATO's enhanced air policing on the alliance's south-eastern flank, and the mission's aircraft appear repeatedly in Romanian incident reports from this period.
| Date | Type | Incident |
|---|---|---|
| 13 Sep 2023 | Incursion | Russian drone fragments found in the Danube Delta |
| 30 Sep 2023 | Incursion | Russian drone detected in Romanian airspace during attack on Ukraine |
| 29 Dec 2023 | Incursion | Russian missile crosses Polish airspace for three minutes |
| 24 Mar 2024 | Incursion | Russian cruise missile violates Polish airspace for 39 seconds |
GlobalMilitary.net's 2026 inventory snapshot shows nine NATO members — Iceland, Luxembourg, the three Baltic states, Montenegro, Albania, North Macedonia and Slovenia — hold no fixed-wing fighters, attack aircraft or bombers and depend on Allied air policing.
GlobalMilitary.net's incident log counts 45 established violations of European airspace between January 1 and August 16, 2026, against 31 for the whole of 2025 - and almost all of the growth sits in incidents that ended with a shootdown or an explosion on the ground.
An Italian Eurofighter on NATO Baltic Air Policing duty destroyed an unidentified drone over eastern Latvia before dawn on 14 August, the second time the alliance's quick-reaction force has shot one down over the country this year.