Romania has declared a staff member of Russia’s embassy in Bucharest persona non grata, ordering him to leave the country within five days. According to the Romanian foreign ministry, the move was prompted by three separate drone incursions into national airspace between 24 and 26 July, all intercepted by Romanian F-16 fighter jets. Investigators from the Romanian prosecutor’s office determined that the debris recovered from the downed aircraft originated from Russia, and fragments were presented to the Russian ambassador during a formal summons. The ministry said a note of protest was handed over, calling such intrusions into NATO and European Union airspace “absolutely unacceptable.”

In Moscow, foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova dismissed the Romanian accusations as “groundless” and “unsubstantiated,” warning that the unfriendly act would draw a “proper response.” Russian officials maintain that similar incidents in the region have involved Ukrainian drones, though the Romanian prosecutor’s office stated that the components shown to the ambassador bore Russian characteristics. The Russian embassy in Bucharest has previously pointed to Ukrainian unmanned systems as the source of threats to navigation in the Black Sea.

The expulsion extends a protracted diplomatic confrontation that has seen multiple rounds of tit-for-tat measures. Since 2022, Romania has expelled more than a dozen Russian diplomats, most recently in March 2025 when it declared the defence attaché and his assistant personae non grata. Russia responded each time with symmetrical expulsions. The friction escalated further after a drone struck a residential building in Galați in late May, leading Bucharest to close the Russian consulate in Constanța and declare its head unwelcome; Moscow retaliated by shutting Romania’s consulate in St Petersburg and capping the size of the Romanian mission in Russia. Romania’s demand in 2023 to cut Russian embassy staff by forty personnel prompted Moscow to denounce an agreement on a consulate in Rostov-on-Don, which closed later that year.

Viewed from Brussels, the drone intrusions into a NATO member’s territory highlight the direct spillover risk of the war in Ukraine onto alliance soil. NATO officials have repeatedly stressed that uninvited entries into allied airspace are a source of concern, and the confirmed Russian-origin finding in the Romanian investigation sharpens that alarm. Similar episodes have been reported in Poland, Latvia, and Finland, where wreckage was often attributed to Russian or Ukrainian assets, though attribution has sometimes remained contested.

The dossier now turns on Moscow’s next step. With Russia promising a “proper response” and Romania having already recalled its own ambassador to Bucharest for consultations, the diplomatic channel remains severely narrowed. Based on the established pattern, a symmetrical expulsion of a Romanian diplomat or further consular restrictions from Moscow is expected, keeping bilateral relations in a downward spiral with no prospect of de-escalation talks on the immediate horizon.