Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store told public broadcaster NRK on Wednesday that a drone almost hit the aircraft carrying Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as it took off from Moldova. Within hours, a source inside Zelenskyy’s own office told AFP that description was overstated.

Both governments agree something happened on September 8. Moldova’s Defense Ministry tracked a Shahed-type drone across the country that afternoon, Romania scrambled Spanish fighters and warned residents to take shelter, and the presidential aircraft reached Oslo that evening. What nobody has published is a distance, a radar track, or a takeoff time.

DroneXL reported the same split in December, when four military-specification drones crossed a no-fly zone as Zelenskyy’s plane approached Dublin, and Kyiv played it down while Dublin called it hybrid warfare.

Moldova Tracked The Drone For Seventeen Minutes

Moldova’s Defense Ministry detected an unmanned aircraft at 4:20 p.m. local time on September 8, entering from the direction of Ukraine. Air surveillance followed it until 4:37 p.m., when it left toward Golaiesti in Romania. That is seventeen minutes across a sovereign country.

Preliminary Moldovan data put the route through Russian-controlled Transnistria, toward Chisinau, then west. Authorities restricted airspace over the central part of the country, which left several civilian aircraft airborne while they waited to land at Chisinau.

Once the drone crossed into Romania, Spanish F/A-18s on NATO air-policing duty launched from Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base. Romanian authorities pushed shelter warnings to residents in several regions. Iasi International Airport stopped takeoffs and landings until the aircraft cleared the area. Romanian radar lost contact just after 5 p.m., and the drone came down near Mihaileni Vechi in Moldova, roughly 15.5 miles (25 kilometers) east of the Romanian border near Botosani County.

None of that is unusual anymore. NATO jets shot down a suspected Russian drone over Romania in a comparable sequence last September, and in May a Russian drone hit an apartment block in Galati while NATO aircraft were airborne. Romanian Defense Minister Radu Miruta confirmed another shootdown near the Moldovan border on August 16, which the Kyiv Independent counted as the fourth suspected Russian incursion into Romanian airspace this year.

Oslo And Kyiv Described The Same Flight Differently

Store’s account to NRK was short and carried no supporting detail. “His flight was almost hit by a drone” as it left Moldova, he said, adding that this is the reality Zelenskyy lives in, according to Al Jazeera. He named no source, gave no distance and offered no timing.

NRK went to the prime minister’s office for more. The office had nothing further to add. Danish outlets covering the same NRK interview noted that it remains unclear which drone was involved or whether any deliberate act lay behind it.

Kyiv then contradicted Oslo. A source in the Ukrainian presidency told AFP that what occurred was an alert in Moldova as a Russian drone entered Moldovan and Romanian airspace, and called the claim that Zelenskyy had been at risk “exaggerated.” A separate source told the Kyiv Independent the opposite, saying the drone nearly hit the plane as it departed.

So the host government says near-miss, the traveler’s own office says overstated, and an anonymous Ukrainian source says near-miss. Three versions, one afternoon.

Dublin Produced This Same Split Nine Months Ago

On December 1, 2025, four military-style drones breached the Irish Aviation Authority’s no-fly zone and flew toward the sea leg of Zelenskyy’s approach to Dublin Airport. His plane landed early, just before 11 p.m., moments before the drones reached the point it had been due to cross.

They then circled the naval vessel LE William Butler Yeats, which did not carry the equipment to bring them down, as The Journal first reported. Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin told parliament the circumstances were “suggestive of this being part of a Russian-inspired hybrid campaign” against European Union and Ukrainian interests.

Kyiv’s response at the time will sound familiar. Zelenskyy adviser Dmytro Lytvyn said the host side is responsible for security and that “there were indeed such drones, but this did not affect the visit.” Full coverage of that incident is in DroneXL’s December report.

Moldova Detects These Drones But Does Not Stop Them

Moldova is not a NATO member, and its published record of these events shows detection and notification rather than interception. The September 8 track is the pattern: two timestamps, a temporary airspace closure, an exit heading, and then a wait for the aircraft to leave.

Nobody shot the Shahed down. It came down by itself, on Moldovan soil. The month before was the same, when Moldova reported a Russian S8000 Banderol cruise missile crossing its airspace on August 17 during an attack on Odesa. That one also arrived, transited, and landed without being touched.

Norway understands the shape of this problem from its own airspace. Drone sightings shut down Oslo and Copenhagen airports in September 2025, and Europe’s answer since then has been slower than the threat. The EU’s much-discussed counter-drone wall is still largely missing in action.

The Oslo meeting itself was about that gap. Zelenskyy and Store sat down with the heads of FirePoint, Kongsberg, Weibel, Saab, Diehl Defence, Hensoldt, Thales, Safran, Sener and Leonardo to advance FREYJA, an anti-ballistic program meant to give Europe an alternative to American Patriot interceptors. Zelenskyy said afterward that the group agreed on specific steps and that “Protecting Europe’s skies is our shared responsibility.”

DroneXL’s Take

Two heads of government have now described drones near Zelenskyy’s aircraft, and both times the checkable details went missing while the alarming sentence traveled around the world. Oslo said near-miss on Wednesday. Kyiv said overstated the same day. Neither of them published a number.

Store handed NRK a claim with no distance, no altitude, no radar track and no source, and his own office had nothing to add when NRK asked. The Moldovan and Romanian record, meanwhile, is unusually complete for an incident this fresh: two detection times, an exit heading, a scrambled flight of Spanish fighters, a lost radar contact, a crash site with a village name attached. Nothing in that record places a Shahed near a departing aircraft. It may still have happened. My read is that nobody has yet shown it, and the one office in a position to show it declined to.

The Dublin file makes clear this is not paranoia. Four military-specification drones reached the exact point on Zelenskyy’s approach at the moment his plane had been due to cross it, and the Irish naval vessel they circled afterward could not touch them. Deliberate interest in his flights is documented, not theoretical.

That is precisely why the loose version costs something. Every unverified near-miss makes the verified ones easier to dismiss, and it hands Moscow a cheap win it did not have to fly for. Ukraine’s own press office understood that well enough to push back on a friendly government within a day, which tells you how it reads from Kyiv.

The part worth the attention is sitting in plain sight. FREYJA’s coalition runs Ukraine, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Moldova is not on that list. The country a Shahed just crossed unopposed on its way into NATO airspace, the country whose capital held civilian traffic in the air while it waited, is outside the program being built to solve that exact problem. Watch whether the first practical results Zelenskyy said he expects from FREYJA include anything Moldova can actually operate, or whether the gap between the coalition and the border it flies over gets wider.

Source: Al Jazeera, NRK, CBS News, Kyiv Independent, The Journal, Ukrinform, Moldovan Ministry of Defense

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.