Nobody's drone

On August 20th, at 06:28am a merchant ship reported a small object drifting inside Romania's exclusive economic zone, 80 nautical miles east of Constanța, a few hundred metres from work at the Neptun Alpha platform, where several hundred people were employed. The defence ministry set up a command cell. Operational control passed from NATO to Romanian national authority, the president was consulted, and two F-16s went out with authorization to fire. One hit the object with its cannon. A naval disposal team completed the job. The drone was carrying an explosive charge.

Defence Minister Radu Miruță later said that Romania had used a recently opened direct channel with Kyiv to ask whether the drone was Ukrainian. The answer was official and negative.

No comparable evidence was subsequently released about its actual origin. No serial numbers were published, no photographs of components, no analysis of the charge. Romanian President Nicușor Dan named the Russian Federation that afternoon. Ursula von der Leyen described the wider pattern as hybrid warfare.

Romanian services can identify these machines when they recover enough of them. On August 11th, divers destroyed two drifting drones in the same waters, and the next day Vice Admiral Mihai Panait, chief of the naval staff, identified them as Gerbera drones of Russian manufacture. He also noted that 159 sea mines had already been cleared from the Black Sea basin. On August 16th, a disposal team recovered a drone wing 83 nautical miles offshore. Three hours before the merchant ship's call on August 20th, another drone crossed Romanian airspace east of Galați.

The reason Bucharest now asks Kyiv first lies in an incident from June.

On June 5th a Ukrainian Sargan-3000 naval drone drifted into berth 78 of Constanța port and self-detonated. Three more exploded at sea. More than a thousand tourists were cleared from beaches and prosecutors opened a criminal case. Kyiv had lost contact with four of the machines the previous afternoon near Sevastopol, about 250 kilometres away. It informed the Romanian side at 09:54am, 34 minutes before the explosion. Bucharest then sent 14 written questions and received the answers on July 3rd.

Romania now has to work inside a sea filled with expendable unmanned systems from both sides. The machines that reach Romanian waters often arrive because something has already gone wrong: navigation failed, communications were lost, electronic warfare interfered with control, or the original mission ended without the weapon itself becoming harmless.

Poland encountered a version of the same problem in November 2022, when a missile killed two people at Przewodów. For much of the first day Europe assumed it was Russian. It turned out to have come from Ukrainian air defence.

The Romanian coast is beginning to experience this uncertainty as a recurring condition.

Had the object a few hundred metres from Neptun Alpha been a Russian corvette, no European government would have needed hours to decide how to describe the event. The amount of explosive and the distance from the platform could have been identical. The difference would have been a flag, a crew, a chain of command and a hull number.

With an unmarked drone, the physical danger can be clear while responsibility remains disputed. That delay is politically useful.

When Romania summoned Russian Ambassador Vladimir Lipaev on July 27th and showed him fragments from earlier drones, the embassy told the Russian outlet Izvestia that it had been shown pieces of polystyrene. It presented the shoot-downs as a staged exercise against training targets, supposedly intended to justify rearmament in a country facing economic difficulties.

The far-right political party, AUR, uses the same uncertainty inside Romania. The party voted against the 2025 law allowing the army to shoot down drones, challenged it before the Constitutional Court and attacks the country's 16.68 billion-euro allocation under the EU SAFE programme. After four drones were destroyed in four days in July, George Simion, founder of AUR, said such machines come from one side and from the other. The June incident gives him a real example.

On the evening of August 20th, retired general Virgil Bălăceanu told Digi24 that the maritime drone was too small and too slow to cause serious damage to a 16,500-tonne platform, that a determined attacker would have other means available and that Romania should not exclude a false-flag operation. He named Neptun Deep and the port of Giurgiulești as two particularly exposed objects. One sits in Romania's exclusive economic zone. The other, bought by Romania this year, is on Moldovan territory.

At the same time, a Romanian website identified the drone as a Ukrainian Sea Baby operated by the SBU and credited parts of its visual analysis to Gemini, ChatGPT and Grok.

Within a single news cycle, the origin of an explosive object near strategic infrastructure had become a contest among government statements, Russian denial, opposition suspicion, military speculation and AI chatbot-assisted identification.

Romania's own forensic account was still missing. This is where attribution becomes part of defence.

Recovered electronics, propulsion systems, manufacturing marks, navigation equipment, explosive composition and reconstructed routes should be published whenever operational security allows it. Some findings will remain incomplete. That is acceptable. An inconclusive technical report is still more useful than an empty space in which every political actor can manufacture their own certainty.

The legal position offshore adds another layer.

Article 60 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea gives the coastal state exclusive jurisdiction over installations in its exclusive economic zone and permits safety zones of up to 500 metres around them. The drone was found within a few hundred metres of Neptun Alpha.

The North Atlantic Treaty was drafted for a different kind of geography. Article 6 defines the Alliance's relevant scope through Allied territory and through the vessels and aircraft of the parties. A fixed offshore installation on the continental shelf fits uneasily into that language.

Romania's 2025 legislation was written for aircraft entering national airspace. It does not provide an equivalent framework for unmanned surface vessels operating in the economic zone. Responsibility for offshore installations is divided among the Coast Guard under the interior ministry, the defence ministry and the operating company. No single body has been given authority to coordinate the others. That helps explain why one drifting hull required a decision that travelled as far as the head of state.

The political machinery responsible for making these decisions is itself under strain. Defence Minister Radu Miruță remains in office even though the government was dismissed by parliament on May 5th, when a censure motion jointly tabled by the Social Democrats and AUR passed with 281 votes. Romania has now spent more than a hundred days without a government exercising full powers, the longest such period since 1989. Seven interim ministers have remained in office well beyond the 45-day limit normally provided for by the constitution, while no new prime minister has yet been appointed.

All of this is happening while Neptun Deep moves towards production.

OMV Petrom and Romgaz are investing about four billion euros in a field holding roughly 100 billion cubic metres of gas. Production is due to begin in 2027 at around eight billion cubic metres a year, making Romania the largest gas producer in the European Union. The security timetable is much less reassuring.

The 1.2 billion euro corvette contract with Naval Group collapsed. The Damen Mangalia yard went bankrupt. Romania's newest significant hull is a second-hand Turkish Hisar-class patrol vessel bought for 223 million euros, with another 42 million needed to arm it properly.

First gas is approaching faster than a modern offshore security system. Some of the missing pieces are administrative and inexpensive.

Romania can declare the safety zone around Neptun Alpha that international law already allows and state publicly what may enter it. It can publish technical findings on every recovered object, including inconclusive findings, until denial becomes harder to sustain. The channel with Kyiv can be formalized and tied to a duty to notify immediately when a weapon is lost. A warning 34 minutes before a detonation is useful, but it is not a serious early-warning system.

Romania also needs a maritime equivalent of its 2025 drone law, with engagement authority delegated below the presidency and one body clearly responsible for offshore installations. The Black Sea Maritime Security Hub that Romania and Bulgaria have designed for Constanța and Varna should be judged in part by how quickly it can establish and publish the origin of objects recovered at sea.

Romania handled the immediate danger on August 20th efficiently. The object was reported, aircraft were sent, the target was hit and the explosives were destroyed. Nobody working near Neptun Alpha was hurt. What remains exposed is the interval between shooting and knowing.

For a country whose most important new energy asset lies in waters crowded with the weapons of a neighbouring war, that interval is becoming a security problem of its own.

 

Avraham Shmulevich is an Israeli political scientist, historian and journalist specializing in the Caucasus, the post-Soviet space, Russia and regional security.