Romania calls for calm as debris from possible Russian drone attacks on Ukraine discovered
Strikes on Danube ports have increased after Moscow left UN-backed grain deal
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, villagers from eight communities near the banks of the Danube River — which forms a border between Romania and Ukraine — received alerts to their mobile phones warning them to keep calm but take shelter, as there was a possibility of objects coming from the sky.
Not long after, residents near the small Romanian village of Plauru heard explosions.
"We are scared," said Elisabeta Samsanov, one of the few dozen people living in the remote community just 300 metres from the Ukrainian port of Izmail, which has become a frequent target of Russian drones in recent weeks.
"One night when they dropped one after another, we came out of the house ... and it felt like an earthquake."
On Wednesday, Romanian defence officials said they discovered drone fragments that are similar to the drones used by the Russian military.
If confirmed that it was a Russian drone, this would presumably be the third time that Russian drone debris has crashed down in Romania in recent days.
Romanian officials have appealed for calm, saying that the country isn't under attack, but at the same time they've deployed the military to set up concrete air raid shelters that they are encouraging residents to use.
Attacks on Ukraine's ports escalate
Since mid-July, Russia has stepped up attacks on Ukraine's Danube ports after the Kremlin pulled out of a United Nations-backed grain deal and said it would consider any vessels in the area military targets.
In an effort to continue exporting grain, shipping has increased from the ports of Izmail and Reni, which vessels reach by travelling along the Black Sea just off the coast of Bulgaria and Romania before reaching the Danube Delta.
Officials from the Romanian port of Constanta say grain traffic has increased 30 per cent over last year. But that increase in ship traffic has coincided with an increase in drone attacks.
On social media, Romanian residents have posted a number of videos of the nighttime attacks on Ukraine, where the buzzing of drones can be heard alongside the air defence systems.
Ukraine's deputy prime minister, Oleksandr Kubrakov, said that since July 18, more than 100 Ukrainian port facilities have been damaged in Russian attacks.
It was Ukrainian officials who had initially disclosed that part of a Russian drone crashed onto Romanian territory on Sept. 4.
The Romanian government quickly dismissed the claims, but two days later it acknowledged that debris from a drone had been found. Local media published pictures of the presumed blast site in the forest, where charred trees stood beside a crater in the dirt.
Russia attack 🇺🇦 Izmail Ukrainian Danube port. Once again close with Romanian 🇷🇴Border. Ruthless attack on Food. <a href="https://t.co/aDOLyGqCFn">pic.twitter.com/aDOLyGqCFn</a>
—@Agricolumn_EUNATO investigating drone strikes
NATO officials pledged solidarity with Romania but said they didn't have any evidence that suggested it was a targeted attack on the country.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the drone strikes demonstrate the risks of "incidents and accidents" and that an investigation was underway.
Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, there have been repeated warnings about the risk of the conflict spilling into the rest of Europe if a member of NATO was attacked and the rest of the alliance had to respond and come to its defence.
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Alina Nychyk, a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, a university in Switzerland, said the North Atlantic Treaty Organization wouldn't openly confront Russia because of the incidents in Romania, but if Russia strikes deeper into NATO countries and they are forced to shoot drone drones and missiles, it would be more serious.
"NATO may have to decide what kinds of attacks it will actually consider responding to," she said in an email to CBC News.
"The West needs to think about how to not allow Russia to test them."
After two people were killed in Poland in November when a missile crashed down, NATO officials said it likely came from Ukraine's air defence system.
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With files from Reuters