Romania briefly sent military aircraft and neighboring Moldova temporarily closed its airspace on Tuesday after authorities in both countries reported mysterious weather balloon-like objects streaking across their skies.
The incidents happened around noon local time and briefly raised concerns in the two Eastern European countries, which border Ukraine and have been hit hard by Russia’s war.
Romania’s defense ministry said it deployed two NATO-command planes in the southeastern skies to search for an aerial object it described as small with “features similar to a weather balloon.” It had initially been detected by radar systems in Romanian airspace at an altitude of about 36,000 feet.
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“The crews of the two aircraft did not confirm the presence of the air target, either visually or on the on-board radars,” a ministry statement said, adding that the two MiG-21 LanceR jets remained in the vicinity for around 30 minutes before to return. to the base.
It was not clear if the two incidents were related, and neither country said where they believed the objects came from.
The Romanian and Moldovan authorities reported an unidentified flying object in their airspace.
The events follow a series of comparable incidents this month in the US, in which objects detected and shot down by fighter jets included a Chinese high-altitude balloon that traversed US airspace. China said it was a weather balloon that had accidentally drifted off course.
The incident in Moldova sparked widespread travel disruption and a brief panic when authorities temporarily closed the country’s airspace over what they later described as a “weather balloon-like” object sighted near the northern border with Ukraine.
Dozens of flights in the country of some 2.6 million people, one of the poorest in Europe, were canceled or rescheduled. Some were diverted to Romania.
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“Given the weather conditions and the impossibility of monitoring and identifying the object as well as its flight path… the decision was made to temporarily close the airspace,” Moldova’s aviation authority said in a statement.
Romania has been a member of NATO since 2004 and a member of the European Union since 2007. Moldova is militarily neutral and therefore not a potential NATO member. It is seeking to forge closer ties with the West and was granted EU candidate status last June, the same day as Ukraine.
On Monday, Moldovan President Maia Sandu accused Russia of plotting to overthrow her country’s government and divert it from its path towards EU membership.
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Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova dismissed Sandu’s claims on Tuesday as “absolutely baseless and baseless.”
