Bulgaria Says Drone Crashes Near Romanian Border, Gas Pipeline
(Bloomberg) -- A drone from an unidentified source entered Bulgarian airspace from Romania early on Saturday and crashed about 100 meters over the NATO member nations’ shared border in far northeast Bulgaria.
Prime Minister Rumen Radev described the incident, the first such instance in Bulgaria, in a video released on social media.
The UAV crashed into in a sunflower field near a compressor station on the Trans Balkan gas pipeline that links Turkey to Ukraine, near the former border crossing at Kardam, after having been undetected by Bulgarian and Romanian radar as well as by NATO’s combined air operations center, Radev said.
The type of drone is unknown and authorities are yet to identify it, he said. There were no casualties or damage to buildings from the incident.
Bulgarian border police and defense ministry personnel were deployed and the area secured and isolated. Radev described the craft as “not a toy drone” and carrying “a solid amount of explosives.”
Romania’s defense ministry said its radar systems had detected no aerial vehicle crossing Romanian airspace into Bulgaria.
“No developments of aerial targets were recorded that would indicate a possible trajectory through the national airspace toward the territory of Bulgaria,” the ministry said.
The incident is the latest in which a drone possibly deployed in the Russia-Ukraine conflict has flown into or landed in a nearby country, including Poland, Romania and Latvia. All of those nations, unlike Bulgaria, share a border with either Ukraine or Russia.
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