“It’s sure, because we had another one four or five weeks ago that didn’t explode. We compared and they are completely identical,” Romania’s President Nicosur Dan told the BBC World Service.<\/p>\n
The drones are used to target Ukrainian ports on the other side of the river Danube that are vitally important to Ukraine’s grain exports.<\/p>\n
On Friday, Romania tracked a swarm of 43 of them as they travelled from east to west.<\/p>\n
“One hit by the Ukrainian army changed direction and passed to Romanian territory. That is sure,” Dan said.<\/p>\n
Romania’s Nato allies have called Russia’s conduct “reckless” and stressed that Moscow’s war of aggression was to blame for what happened.<\/p>\n
In Washington, though, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio ignored reporters’ requests to comment.<\/p>\n
And there is clearly caution in the response, as well as condemnation.<\/p>\n
No-one is accusing Moscow of mounting a deliberate attack on Romania.<\/p>\n
And whilst government sources in Bucharest tell us they considered invoking Article 4 of the Nato treaty, which would trigger an emergency meeting, that idea was rejected to avoid creating panic.<\/p>\n
The next potential step would have been Article 5: the mutual defence clause, under which an attack on one member is considered an attack on all.<\/p>\n
That’s not on the table.<\/p>\n
Instead, Romania has shut down a Russian consulate in the port city of Constanta as a “warning”, according to its president. Dan said the next move in the “diplomatic hierarchy of measures” would be to kick out the Russian ambassador.<\/p>\n
But for now, he’s going nowhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“It’s sure, because we had another one four or five weeks ago that didn’t explode. We compared and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":612595,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-612594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612594\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/612595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}