The Russian drone that struck a Romanian apartment building, causing a fire and injuring two people, is not the first time a Nato member has been hit during the war with Ukraine but it comes at a perilous moment for the alliance.
General Secretary Mark Rutte condemned “Russia’s reckless behaviour” as “a danger to us all”. He said he had assured Romania’s President Nicușor Dan that Nato "stands ready to defend every inch of allied territory".
But the “growing fear in European capitals is that President Vladimir Putin will try next to reshuffle the cards by expanding the conflict” to other parts of the continent, said Yaroslav Trofimov in The Wall Street Journal.
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“There have been numerous incidents of drones crashing in countries across the region throughout the Russia-Ukraine war,” said Vitaly Shevchenko on BBC Monitoring. “Generally, these have been described as accidents, although it is difficult to verify the intention behind each of these events.”
In recent weeks, Russia “has made increasingly bellicose statements against the Baltic states”, said the WSJ. It has threatened to bomb “decision-making centres” in Latvia, after accusing the country of hosting Ukrainian drone operators, while air-raid alarms were sounded in Lithuania last week when suspected Russian drones approached its airspace from Belarus.
As Russia “fails to gain ground in Ukraine and suffers staggering troop casualties”, said Adam Goldman in The New York Times, Putin “appears to be pursuing a wider conflict in Europe, increasingly targeting critical infrastructure and supply chains”.
Moscow is “scaling up its daily hybrid activity against the UK and Europe”, said Anne Keast-Butler, director of GCHQ. The UK’s intelligence, security and cyber agency has been countering what Keast-Butler called the Kremlin’s “reckless sabotage and assassination attempts”.
“Russia can’t afford to continue the war on its current trajectory because it will face the trap of diminishing resources,” Oleksandr V. Danylyuk, chair of the Center for Defense Reforms think tank in Kyiv, told the WSJ. “This means that Putin will have to escalate.” It’s quite plausible that he does this “by expanding the geography of the conflict as he seeks to freeze the war on better terms”.
De-escalation on both sides seems quite a way off, said Yauheni Preiherman, founder and director of the Minsk Dialogue Council on International Relations think tank, on Al Jazeera.
“The rhetoric on both sides says it all.” Lithuanian foreign minister Kestutis Budrys replied to Moscow’s bomb threats by saying that, if necessary, Nato “has all the means to level the Russian air defence and missile bases”. But “simply doubling down” on the “political posturing” that has “essentially brought about the current situation will only continue making things worse for everyone”.
What next?
President Trump’s recent threats to withdraw from Nato, and his decision to reduce US forces deployed in Europe, have undermined the alliance’s deterrence. Senior European officials told the WSJ they fear Russia may see an opening in the next 12 months but it would be a risky endeavour.
“This would be such a huge and additional big risk for Putin to, after having been not sufficiently successful against Ukraine, to simply add another very strong adversary in a military conflict,” said Norbert Röttgen, a German politician. Putin, however, is known for taking big gambles, he added. “Despite my doubts, we also have to calculate that Putin behaves irrationally and in an escalatory way.”
