NATO nation Romania scrambled fighter jets on Tuesday after Russia launched drone attacks near its border with Ukraine, the Romanian government said.
Two Romanian F-16 fighter jets took off from an air base in the southeast of the country and air defense systems were put in “firing positions,” Bucharest’s defense ministry said in a statement.
No drones ultimately crossed over into Romanian airspace, the government said.
Russian drones have repeatedly strayed into NATO territory since the start of Moscow’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Fighter jets stationed in Romania and Poland, both of which border western Ukraine, frequently take to the skies when the Kremlin bombards Ukrainian territory.
Several other NATO members, including Finland and Estonia, have reported Ukrainian drones landing in their territory during long-range attacks on Russian energy infrastructure, like oil terminals, near the alliance’s eastern flank.
Emergency alerts were triggered for northern parts of Romania‘s Tulcea country shortly after 3:45 a.m. local time Tuesday (8:45 a.m. ET Monday) and ended roughly an hour later.
Tulcea sits directly across the border from the Ukrainian port of Izmail, which Russia has repeatedly attacked. The River Danube marks the border between the two countries, just north of Tulcea.
Local Ukrainian authorities said Russia had “massively attacked” civilian and port infrastructure with drones, damaging a Panamanian-flagged ship and other facilities at Izmail. No casualties were reported.
Two buses, a service station, six homes and seven cars were hit, Oleh Kiper, the governor of southern Ukraine’s Odesa region, said in a statement. Kiper then said a Liberian-flagged ship was hit by a Russian strike.
Local officials released images purporting to show the aftermath of the Russian attacks. In one photograph, orange flames stream from the wreckage of an unidentified building, while another shows the shattered windshield and windows of a two-decker bus.
Newsweek could not independently verify the images.
Russia did not specifically refer to strikes on southern Ukraine in statements on Tuesday, but said its forces had destroyed Ukrainian energy and transport sites, along with military facilities.
Several Ukrainian regions lost power early on Tuesday after Russian attacks on the country’s energy infrastructure, Ukraine’s government said.
The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said on Tuesday the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (ZNPP) in southern Ukraine had lost all off-site power after it was disconnected from its last external power line.
The facility is Europe’s largest nuclear power plant and is not currently operational but needs access to off-site power to keep it safe.
The site has been cut off from external power more than a dozen times since the start of the war, raising persistent fears of a nuclear disaster at the facility. Russia has run the plant since March 2022.
Emergency diesel generators “immediately” kicked in, the IAEA said, adding its experts were monitoring the site.
Power was subsequently restored to the ZNPP after approximately 90 minutes.
Ukrainian officials said later on Tuesday four people had been killed and another 25 injured in a Russian attack on the central city of Dnipro.
Ten of those wounded, some of which had injuries caused by shrapnel, are in a “serious condition” in hospital, said regional governor Oleksandr Hanzha.
Update 4/14/2026 at 8:30 a.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.