| Date | 13 Sep 2025 |
| Tracker | European Airspace Violations |
| Type | Incursion |
| Location |
Chilia Veche, Tulcea County, Romania
45.42, 29.29 (approximate) |
A Russian drone was detected inside Romanian airspace and two F-16s were scrambled at 18:05 to monitor the Ukrainian border. The fighters intercepted the drone and tracked it for around 50 minutes, from Chilia Veche to Pardina, until it crossed back into Ukraine. Permission to shoot it down was granted, but the pilots declined to fire because of the risk of collateral damage on the ground. Romania summoned the Russian ambassador afterwards.
| Date | Type | Incident |
|---|---|---|
| 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 |
| 19 Sep 2025 | Incursion | Three Russian MiG-31s violate Estonian airspace for 12 minutes |
| 19 Sep 2025 | Incursion | Russian fighters violate safety zone of Polish drilling platform |
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.