A Shahed drone that crossed into Romania was shot down by an F-18 of the Spanish Air Force and Space Force on Sunday morning after Romanian authorities detected it near Galați and cleared the crew to engage. The aircraft, on Air Policing duty at Baza 57 Aeriană „Mihail Kogălniceanu”, made radar contact with the target before firing safely at 05:01.
The timing matters because this was not a routine alert but a live pursuit that unfolded across two airspaces in minutes. In Moldova, the same object was already being tracked before it left through Slobozia Mare at 04:49, which explains why the interception came only after it entered Romania: the authorization to engage was tied to the target inside Romanian airspace, where the crew could act under the mission rules in force.
Romanian authorities said the aerial target was first detected at 04:44, about 24 kilometres north of Galați, and that the air alert for the county ended at 05:20. A possible impact point for drone debris was identified in an unpopulated area between Băleni and Cudalbi, but the authorities did not say whether that spot was confirmed as the actual crash site.
The cross-border trail began earlier on the Moldovan side. The Ministry of Defense in Chișinău said a Shahed 138, also identified as a Geran-2, had unlawfully overflown Moldovan airspace after Russian air attacks in Ukraine. It was detected at 04:31, a Border Police patrol heard the sound of an aircraft at 04:40 without seeing it, and the object moved toward Cișmichioi in Moldova and Dolinskoe in Ukraine before leaving toward Romania.
That sequence leaves one question more important than the shootdown itself: whether the object found on the Romanian side was the drone’s remains or only a possible debris field marked by radar and the ground search. Romanian officials said they monitor the situation permanently and inform allied structures in real time, but they have not yet given a final recovery result. For now, the clearest fact is the one that closed the morning — a foreign fighter jet brought down an intruding drone over Romania before it could go any farther.
