Poland has temporarily closed the airports in Rzeszow and Lublin in the southeast of the country after the army scrambled planes due to Russian strikes in Ukraine, Reuters reported, citing the Polish aviation agency, BTA reported.
“Due to the need to guarantee freedom of action for military aviation, the airports in Rzeszow and Lublin were temporarily closed“, the agency wrote in an article in “Ex“. The agency later announced that the airports had resumed operations. Meanwhile, explosions were heard in the western Ukrainian cities of Lviv and Ternopil after Ukraine's armed forces reported Russian drone and missile strikes, Ukrainian media reported.
“Russia is again attacking our energy infrastructure“, the Ukrainian Energy Ministry wrote on “Telegram“. “There are emergency power outages in a number of Ukrainian regions“, the ministry added. The full extent of the damage is not yet clear, Reuters notes.
Ukrainian media reported that a multi-story residential building was hit in Ternopil, and an eyewitness said that there were power outages in Lviv during the attack. The governor of the Lviv region, Maxim Kozytsky, wrote on Telegram that energy facilities and an industrial facility were damaged as a result of the attack, but there were no casualties.
Against this background, it became clear that Romanian and German fighter jets took off from air bases in Romania last night due to a drone located in the airspace of Ukraine and Moldova, which entered Romanian airspace within a few minutes amid another Russian attack on Ukrainian territory, Agerpress reported, citing the Romanian Ministry of National Defense, BTA reported.
Two German Eurofighter fighter jets, which are on an air policing mission in Romania, took off from the Mihail Kogalniceanu air base shortly after midnight. A little later, two Romanian fighter jets took off from the Campia Turzii base.
Twenty minutes after midnight, a message was sent to the population in the northern part of the Romanian county of Tulcea via the RO-ALERT warning system, and within a few minutes, the drone signal was detected entering about eight kilometers into Romanian airspace towards the villages of Periprava and Kilia Veche on the Romanian bank of the Danube. After that, the radar signal from the drone disappeared.
There have been no reports of any parts of the drone falling on Romanian territory, but expert teams are prepared to conduct a field search.