| Date | 20 Aug 2026 |
| Tracker | European Airspace Violations |
| Type | Strike |
| Location |
Grindu, Tulcea County, Romania
45.41, 28.20 (approximate) |
Romanian radar tracked aerial targets near the Ukrainian border north of Tulcea at 02:23 on 20 August. One of them crossed into national airspace about thirteen kilometres east of Galati at 03:21 and came down three minutes later some four kilometres north-east of Grindu, in Tulcea County, where the impact started a fire that burned itself out. Two Spanish Air and Space Force F-18s and a Romanian IAR-330 SOCAT were scrambled. The defence ministry said the recovered fragments posed no pyrotechnic risk and did not state the drone's origin. Hours later a Romanian F-16 destroyed an explosive-laden maritime drone drifting near the Neptun Deep gas platform, eighty nautical miles east of Constanta.
| Date | Type | Incident |
|---|---|---|
| 17 Aug 2026 | Strike | Russian Banderol missile crosses into Moldova and explodes near Talmaza |
| 20 Aug 2026 | Incursion | Russian Il-20 crosses into Finnish airspace south of Utö |
| 20 Aug 2026 | Strike | Drone craters found on Moldovan soil near Giurgiulesti |
| 22 Aug 2026 | Incursion | Russian Shahed-138 crosses Moldovan airspace for seventeen minutes |
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.