| Date | 3 Sep 2025 |
| Tracker | European Airspace Violations |
| Type | Incursion |
| Location |
Plauru, Tulcea County, Romania
45.32, 28.83 (approximate) |
A Russian drone came down on Romanian territory during the strike wave of the night of 3-4 September. The claim was initially denied, but on 5 September drone fragments were identified near the village of Plauru on the Ukrainian border, and further fragments were found on 9 September. The sequence — denial, then recovery of debris days later — recurs throughout the early Romanian record, where the Danube Delta is sparsely populated enough that wreckage is often found by chance rather than located from radar tracks.
| Date | Type | Incident |
|---|---|---|
| 25 Aug 2025 | Incursion | Ukrainian drone crosses Latvia and explodes in Tartu County |
| 4 Sep 2025 | Incursion | Two Russian drones monitored inside Polish airspace |
| 8 Sep 2025 | Incursion | Drone with Cyrillic markings crashes near the Belarus border |
| 9 Sep 2025 | Interception | NATO shoots down Russian drones in the largest incursion into Poland |
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.