BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — Debris from what is believed to be a Russian drone landed in a rural area of Romania, the country’s Defense Ministry said Thursday, in the latest apparent incident of drone wreckage from the war in neighboring Ukraine falling onto the NATO member’s soil.
In Ukraine, meanwhile, the country’s president announced that authorities have detained an 18-year-old suspect in connection with the shooting death of a former lawmaker who was an advocate for the use of the Ukrainian language instead of Russian.
Since the war started in February 2022, Romania has confirmed drone fragments on its territory on several occasions.
The debris of what the Defense Ministry called a drone of Russian origin was found following Russian attacks on Ukraine’s port infrastructure near the border.
A statement said the fragments were discovered by a team of specialists in an uninhabited area near the village of Plauru in Tulcea county, which is across the Danube River from the Ukrainian port of Izmail.
The discovery came after Russia carried out overnight attacks on “civilian targets and port infrastructure” in Ukraine over the past two nights, the ministry said. Those assaults prompted Romania to deploy warplanes to monitor its airspace.
The ministry strongly condemned the Russian attacks, calling them “unjustified and in serious contradiction with the norms of international law.”
Romania’s emergency authorities issued text alerts both nights to residents living in Tulcea, and NATO allies were kept informed, the ministry said.
Meanwhile, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday on his Telegram channel that the suspect in the slaying of Iryna Farion, 60, was detained in Dnipro, hundreds of kilometers (miles) to the east.
Farion was gunned down in the street in broad daylight last Friday in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Police said the incident was being treated as an assassination.
“The detention operation was very difficult,” Zelenskyy said. “Over recent days, hundreds of specialists of the National Police of Ukraine, SBU (security service) and other services worked on solving the murder.”
Farion’s death shocked Ukraine, and several thousand mourners attended her funeral in Lviv.
Farion was a member of the Ukrainian parliament between 2012 and 2014. She was best known for her campaigns to promote the use of the Ukrainian language by Ukrainian officials who spoke Russian.
Russian speakers are common in eastern parts of Ukraine, by the border with Russia, and some long-serving officials speak Russian after years of Soviet rule.
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