| Date | 1 Sep 2026 |
| Tracker | European Airspace Violations |
| Type | Strike |
| Location |
Viișoara, Vaslui County, Romania
46.38, 27.90 (approximate) |
A shepherd found a damaged drone on farmland outside Viișoara, in Vaslui County, on the morning of 1 September 2026 and alerted police at 10:15; the site lies about thirty kilometres from the Moldovan border. He told Romanian television the machine was still whining with its lights on, and that he pulled two wires out of it before it stopped. A pyrotechnic team from the Romanian Intelligence Service established that it carried an explosive charge, widened the cordon and destroyed it in a controlled detonation. Nobody was hurt. The prosecutor's office at the Iași Court of Appeal opened an investigation; no authority stated the drone's type or origin.
| Date | Type | Incident |
|---|---|---|
| 27 Aug 2026 | Incursion | Five Russian drones cross Moldova hours before the Independence Day parade |
| 28 Aug 2026 | Incursion | Turkish drone crosses into Greek airspace near Alexandroupolis airport |
| 30 Aug 2026 | Incursion | Unidentified aerial object enters Moldova at Dnestrovsk and turns back after nine minutes |
| 1 Sep 2026 | Incursion | Drone crosses Latvia at Alūksne and flies on into south-eastern Estonia |
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.