The military anecdote of Ukraine’s war gained an unusual addition on Thursday night (10): a mysterious drone crashed in the Croatian capital, about 600 km from the borders of the Kiev government, having spent almost an hour in the airspace of two members of NATO (Western Military Alliance).
The incident was recorded, according to news agencies, in the Jarun district of Zagreb at around 11pm (6pm GMT). The device crashed next to a student accommodation. “It’s amazing that no one was hurt,” said the city’s mayor, Tomislav Tomasevic.
The Croatian government ruled out that it was an attack, but an unusual visit, probably by a Soviet-made Tu-141 drone operated by the Ukrainian Air Force, based on an analysis of the wreckage.
In 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea and started the civil war in eastern Ukraine, Kiev reactivated the units it had on the device, a rudimentary drone: more similar to a cruise missile with aerial reconnaissance functions. Ukraine uses the sophisticated Turkish attack model Bayraktar-TB2 in the current conflict.
It is quite possible that Ukraine is employing the device now, but it is also not impossible that Russia has taken some model from deposits to use as targets to confuse Kiev’s air defenses.
Be that as it may, the trajectory of the device does not seem to serve either of these functions well, as it passes far from areas where there is more intense combat. Ukraine’s Defense Ministry told Croatian website Jutarni List that there was no record of the loss of the device.
The bigger problem is something else. The device penetrated the airspace of Hungary and Croatia, two NATO member countries, without being noticed. It is not exactly small: it is 14 m long and has a wingspan of 3 m. It flies at a maximum of 1,000 km/h and has a range of 1,000 km.
“We have to review certain procedures and determine how it was possible for an aircraft of this size to fly from Ukraine to Zagreb without being shot down, let alone one so unsophisticated,” said President Zoran Milanovic.
A total of 152 units of the device were built, by the traditional manufacturer Tupolev, between 1979 and 1989. They are not sophisticated with current American drones, such as the Global Hawk, which can spend more than 30 hours in the air watching targets with sophisticated sensors. It uses analog cameras to recognize straight paths without complex maneuvers.
The fear of the spread of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is a constant. Poland has been trying to interfere more in the war, sending not just missiles but fighter jets to Kiev. The United States rejected the idea, as well as the creation of a no-fly zone, because both actions would be perceived as a declaration of war — possibly the Third World War.
