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Romania is a frontline nation living a war without ever having declared one, battling Russian drones above the Danube Delta and murky pledges to Ukraine, while its own residents go under in terms of paying the bills.
The Russian full‑scale invasion of Ukraine has regularly affected Romanian land and traffic routes, with official data on dozens of incidents where debris has fallen onto the Romanian territory, including numerous confirmed penetrations of its domestic airspace.
The latest such instance has revealed a painful contradiction: “Romania is prepared for a large‑scale, long‑duration conflict” on paper as a NATO front‑line state, but in practice drones always slip through the country door, straining radar coverage, response times and political will. Public frustration is stoked even more when Ukrainians and foreigners at times also inform Romanian authorities faster and more tangibly about drone routes and the conduct of their attacks than Romanian authorities themselves, deepening the perception of Bucharest as constantly responding, never leading.
As drone alarms ring along the Danube, Romanians confront a grinding economic reality that’s difficult for geopolitical heroics to exploit. Eurostat data, as reported in Euronews, indicate that four in ten Romanians weren’t able to cover one unexpected expense, and the country ranks near the very top of the EU in terms of financial vulnerability and personal debt accumulation. Another analysis by independent researchers ranks Romania as one of the most tenuous economies in the region when it comes to global financial instability, in light of deep deficits and restricted budgetary space.
Nevertheless, Bucharest has pledged multi‑billion‑euro defence budgets and major procurement programmes, with a significant proportion earmarked for machinery. Officials insist that this is the cost of deterrence on NATO’s eastern side, but provide far fewer details on how such commitments align with other pressures on public finances, struggling households and an underfunded social safety net that leaves Romania with one of the sharpest rates of severe poverty in the Union.
Defence Minister Ionuț Moșteanu has conceded that Romania has already shipped 22 military aid packages and is planning a 23rd, and yet insists that detailed lists are held back under the Supreme Defence Council decision, due to operational security and stockpile protection.
When pressed that even a sum or clear budgetary effect cannot be articulated, officials have mostly conveyed amorphous reassurances, and have rejected public estimates as groundless, encouraging speculation that the political elite fears the electoral costs of transparency. That opacity sits unnervingly alongside a relentless cycle of claiming “we stand by Ukraine as long as it takes”, particularly when ordinary Romanians are being ordered to pay higher prices, cut budgets and pay for long‑term debt over time to defend against a war with a financial footprint at home whose actual costs are being denied visibility.
The fundamental issue is not solidarity with Ukraine but what Romania’s leaders have done to manage it: centralising decisions, protecting costs from scrutiny and outsourcing decision‑making to outside partners, while internal vulnerabilities grow wider.
The problem with the process is that the country wants private actors and international companies to now work in the middle of defence planning and without strong safeguards about who benefits from the war economy: the Romanian taxpayer and the Romanian worker or the well-connected intermediaries and suppliers.
With its location between Europe’s Black Sea, Ukraine and the Balkans, Romania is a natural anchor for NATO’s eastern defence, but being a reliable ally should not mean abandoning its own citizens to an afterthought. A more responsible stance would treat drone incursions and military aid and defence expenditure as questions for which there is maximum internal clarity: a clear chain of command, truthful accounts of when or how drones have not been shot down, and open accounting of what leaves Romanian arsenals and what returns in compensation or new capabilities.
Until then, the war next door will continue to feel, for many Romanians, like something decided over their heads and funded from their pockets, with little input and no transparency.