As part of the SAFE EU financial instrument Romania is spending a lot of cash on defense measures for drones and other armament[1]. Currently still relying heavily on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard for anti-air as well as fighter jets with air-to-air missiles, as these recent drones were all brought down by F-16s.

Aside from strategic targets, a lot of the civilian infrastructure is quite vulnerable to drone attacks as there's a huge border to cover and definitely not enough anti-drone tech deployed. An apartment building was hit months ago with no casualties: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/apartment-building-hit-...

[1] https://www.rheinmetall.com/en/media/news-watch/news/2026/06...

URL appears to go to home page of RO military, another URL is: https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20260726-romanian-jet-sho...

I hope they don’t send any to Bulgaria. Our PM is waiting exactly this to declare we’re joining the Russian federation.

It's not World War 3. It's just two increasingly overlapping unsolvable wars involving two increasingly coherent geopolitical blocs consisting of dozens of countries spanning three continents, most major nuclear powers holding 95% of global nuclear stockpiles and the vast majority of global military spending and resources, with nuclear-capable cruise, ballistic, and hypersonic missiles flying back and forth, attacks on strategic nuclear early warning systems, threats of nuclear first-use and global nuclear holocaust, etc. Fighting over issues the leaders of the involved superpowers and great powers have described as existential and beyond compromise.

Not World War 3 though, currently.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/26/ukraine-war-br...

Given how poor their Ukrainian war is going, this is a strange move. I guess it’s mostly just posturing?

Why are these drones so easy to shoot down, but the ones invading airspaces over nuclear bases and other sensitive installations hundreds of times for months all over Europe and the east coast of the US were never shot down or tracked even once?

We seems scarily only one rogue actor or screw up from WW III in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

The big part that I didn’t see was whether this was a Russian drone or Ukrainian drone

Time to expell some more Russian embassy staff.

Because Russian's war with Ukraine is unsustainable, something has to change for Putin for him to remain in power, and one option is an escalation with NATO.

Some other scenarios also explained in this good video

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jDhYFSGkaAc

“Dear Mr Putin, Please don’t use our airspace to attack Ukraine else we will be forced to write you another slightly more strongly worded letter next time. Thanks, NATO”

AIUI Russia has been regularly intruding into Finnish airspace and has often penetrated the land border with Georgia.

It’s one of those “let’s see how much we can get away with” probes to try to establish a new status quo. I wonder how Russia would respond to NATO drones doing the same.

Drones shot down in Romania, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Finland, etc.

These are probes. Judging responses and response times.

Rumor is Polish GROM have been inside Russia for months.

Edit: See sources in my comment below. I bring receipts.

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It's all a sham so that we, Romania, would be dragged into this war. That will only mean the end of the comprador regime currently ruling over us, but until then most probably many of us, Romanian men, will get killed "defending" the Western regime. Such is life, i.e. requiring sacrifices.

With the heatwaves and drought in Europe it's probably not the best time to have flaming wreckage falling from the sky.

What does this have to do with startups?