A drone crossed into Moldovan airspace near Palanca, Ștefan Vodă District, at 17:38 local time (14:38 UTC) on 26 August 2026, then exited back into Ukraine near Tudora, close to Hradenytsi in the Odesa region, five minutes later at 17:43 local time (14:43 UTC), Moldova's Ministry of Defence said. The crossing came during a Russian aerial strike wave against Ukraine that day; no debris, damage, or injuries were reported on Moldovan territory.
Palanca and Tudora have carried a drone across before
The National Army's Air Operations Service detected the aircraft entering at Palanca and tracked it out again toward Tudora and Hradenytsi, per its statement carried by Realitatea.md. This is not the first recorded crossing at this border point: MoldPres reported a Shahed-type drone flying over Moldovan airspace at the same Palanca crossing point on 18 March 2026, sighted twice by border guards overnight before it was destroyed after leaving Moldovan territory. Wednesday's crossing left no wreckage and no reported detonation - a transit, not a crash.
Three confirmed violations along this border in less than a week
Moldova logged a separate airspace violation two days earlier, on 24 August, when a drone crossed from Vynohradivka in Odesa region toward Vulcănești in Gagauzia and exited near Pașcani in Cahul district heading toward Romania - a longer transit through a different stretch of the border, according to Interfax-Ukraine. Russian drone strikes had already damaged infrastructure at the Tabaky border crossing on the night of 21 August and at the Vynohradivka-Vulcănești crossing on the night of 25 August, per the same outlet.
AirVeto's reconstruction of the Kopanka crash in July shows the more severe outcome this pattern of crossings can produce: a drone that came down and exploded on Moldovan soil, rather than transiting through.
A brief, undetonated transit like this one adds little on its own, but it is the third confirmed Moldovan airspace violation in five days along a border that has now produced both quick pass-throughs and a fatal-risk crash within the same two months. This reconstruction is based on reporting by LRT, Ukrinform, Realitatea.md, and Interfax-Ukraine; full methodology is on the AirVeto methodology page. A full archive of drone and airspace incidents across the EU's eastern border is at the incident archive.