The first piece of bad news: the drone that fell in Galați, caused an explosion, and wounded two people may not have been an accident, but a deliberate Russian attack.
The even worse news: more attacks may follow, disguised as navigation errors. Perhaps more frequent, more precise, harsher, farther from the front line. Deliberately harder for the Romanian military to sweep under the rug with laughable texts like the ones delivered in the morning: “This does NOT constitute an attack on Romania, but a conflict at our border, with consequences for the population in the area.”
The truly terrible news: the capital letters in “NOT” scream helplessness. The Romanian military squandered precious time and did not seriously prepare for the scenario of targeted Russian attacks. Even though we had, and still have, the most valuable partnership for dealing with this kind of provocation: the one with Ukraine.
We will probably not know with certainty anytime soon whether Moscow ordered the strike on an apartment block in Galați. But it is certain that no one can still rule out this hypothesis simply because it is too grave to be spoken aloud. In matters of national security, the reassuring explanation is not necessarily the true one. Sometimes it is merely the anesthetic administered to people so that the responsible institutions can continue their sleep.
All the more so because this is not an incident that appeared out of nowhere. The drone fell in Galați at a time when Russia is diversifying its aggression against Europe.
On the front in Ukraine, Putin is taking a serious beating. The lightning war promised by Kremlin propaganda has turned into a war of attrition, costly militarily, economically, and politically. Ukraine is striking ever deeper into Russian infrastructure, constantly perfecting its drone warfare, and is one step away from creating the perfect context for a successful counteroffensive. Pushed into the ropes, Moscow is forced to look for other spaces of pressure.
This is how Russia operates when it can no longer win quickly where it started the war. It moves the front. It multiplies it. It mixes it. It turns it into a network of provocations calibrated below the threshold of declared war, but above the threshold of normality. Cyberattacks. Sabotage. GPS jamming. Conveniently stray drones. Fabricated accusations. Passports offered to Russian-speaking populations in separatist territories. Diplomatic threats wrapped in the language of international law chewed over by rhinoceroses like Lavrov.
Nowhere is this recipe felt more acutely than in the Baltic states.
Moscow accuses Latvia of allowing Ukraine to launch attacks against Russia from its territory. It reheats the old pretext of “protecting Russians” outside its borders. Lithuania reports the expansion of Russian capabilities to jam and spoof GPS signals from Kaliningrad. In parallel, Putin is simplifying the granting of Russian citizenship to residents of Transnistria, reactivating the same political weapon used in Georgia, Donbas, and Crimea: first you create “Russian citizens,” then you claim you have an obligation to defend them.
The explosion in Galați must also be interpreted within this logic. Not as an unfortunate accident at the edge of the war, but as a possible piece of the same arsenal of controlled intrusion, intimidation, and calculated ambiguity.
This is Russia’s strategic specialty: to do enough to produce fear, but little enough for the victim to hesitate. To strike, but still be able to deny it. To test, but leave room for “perhaps it was an error.” To push the limit of Western tolerance a few centimeters farther, then wait for the reaction. If the reaction is weak, it tries again. If the reaction is confused, it insists. If the reaction is split between caution, stammering, and fear of escalation, then the mission has already succeeded.
And Romania’s reaction so far has been exactly the kind of reaction Moscow can interpret as weakness. Defensive, foggy, bureaucratic. We were told that the drone was detected, then lost. That it was flying low. That jets were scrambled. That the pilots were authorized to engage the target. That, nevertheless, it could not be intercepted. All these explanations may be technically, partly true. But for the Romanian citizen who sees a Russian drone hit a building in his country, the result matters more than the technical scheme: the system did not work.
This is the raw nerve. Romania knew that, sooner or later, something like this would happen. It could not have failed to know. We had no right not to know.
We are a NATO state on the edge of the war. We have helped Ukraine from the first day of the invasion. We are a few kilometers from areas constantly bombed by Russia. We have already had drone fragments fall on our territory. We have had alerts before. We have had explanations before about low altitudes, radars, procedures, permissions, and limitations. With every episode, the Romanian state received another warning. With every warning, it should have built, faster, denser, more pragmatically, a real anti-drone defense system.
It did not do enough.
Romania has behaved for too long as if NATO membership could stand in for an operational shield. It cannot. NATO deters total war. But NATO, as a political and military idea, does not automatically shoot down a drone flying at low altitude toward an apartment block in Galați. For that, you need proper sensors, layered systems, jamming, interceptors, mobile teams, clear procedures, fast decision-making, and people trained to react in minutes, not to explain in press conferences why it could not be done.
Even more serious is that Romania has, right next to it, the most important anti-drone defense school in the world: Ukraine. Kyiv did not survive by luck. If Ukraine had been as vulnerable to Russian attacks as we are, after four years of war on the border, it would have been brought to its knees long ago. It survived because it learned under fire, improvised intelligently, integrated sensors, radars, jamming, mobile teams, cheap interceptors, and flexible procedures. In a very short time, it did what bureaucratized states put off for years.
Romania should have been among the first countries to request institutional, massive, and urgent access to this know-how. Not just declarations of solidarity. Not just protocol meetings. Not just projects that will someday deliver systems. But accelerated operational cooperation, adapted to the risk on the Danube and the Black Sea, built with those who defend themselves daily against exactly the threat that has now arrived, in the middle of the night, in an apartment in Galați.
If the deliberate-attack scenario is confirmed, Romania must expect new episodes. Perhaps not tomorrow. Perhaps not in the same place. Perhaps not with the same type of drone. But with the same logic: testing the reaction, inducing fear, exploiting ambiguity, forcing Romanian authorities to choose between denial and assumption.
And if it is not confirmed, and it was “just” a drone that slipped out of control in an environment saturated by electronic warfare, the conclusion still does not change: the current defense did not prevent an apartment block in Romania from being hit.
This is the brutal lesson of the Galați explosion. Russia is testing limits. Ukraine can teach us how a state under drone attack defends itself. And Romania no longer has the right to respond with sluggishness, press releases, and capital letters placed where capabilities should have existed.
Because the next drone may no longer fall in the forests on the edge of the Danube. And it may no longer wound only two people.