Romania is learning what an expensive way this is to shoot down a cheap drone. The Romanian military spent approximately €1.5 million downing three drones that violated the country's airspace over three days, the Romanian outlet Digi24 reported.

The cost is almost all in the missiles. Most of the spending was on AIM-9X missiles fired from F-16 fighters, which cost about $400,000 each.

Three drones were downed with three missiles, for roughly $1.2 million, and adding the flight hours and aircraft maintenance brings the total for the three operations to about $1.75 million.

Those three shootdowns are the ones Romania carried out on 24, 25, and 26 July, when, for the first time, Romanian jets fired on drones violating its airspace rather than merely escorting them. Romania's Defense Ministry is now searching for more economical solutions.

This is the cost problem Ukraine already solved

Romania is meeting the exact economic trap that has defined air defense in the war next door. A Russian Shahed or Geran drone costs on the order of $10,000 to $50,000. A Western air-to-air missile that downs one costs many times that, and Romania has just spent an F-16 missile worth $400,000 on each of three drones.

Ukraine spent two years fighting its way out of that trap. It drove the cost-per-intercept down by scaling interceptor drones that kill Shaheds for a few thousand dollars each, standing up machine-gun fire groups, and reviving cheap guns, precisely because using a million-dollar missile against a $20,000 drone is a trade that bankrupts the defender long before it bankrupts the attacker.

Digi24 suggested Romania could intercept drones more cheaply with helicopters, using their onboard machine guns instead of missiles, one of the same low-cost methods Ukraine reached for.

The drones keep coming because the war is next door

The three-day run of incursions is not an anomaly but the spillover of Russia's air war on Ukraine. Romania shares a 650-kilometer border with Ukraine, and Russian strike drones aimed at Ukrainian ports on the Danube regularly stray or push into Romanian airspace, having crossed into NATO territory dozens of times during the war.

On 29 May, a Russian Geran-2 hit a residential building in Galați on 29 May, injuring people inside a NATO and EU member state, which is part of why Romania shifted from escorting strays to shooting them down.

Russia has likely turned a helicopter into a flying drone-jammer. Moscow has built a new complex on an Mi-8 helicopter, likely intended to counter drones, according to Militarnyi. The whole assessment of what it does and how is Militarnyi's analysis of photographs, not a confirmed Russian capability.

According to Militarnyi, the helicopter carries several panel antennas mounted at different angles to cover a 180-degree sector, with a likely mirror set on the other side of the aircraft for full coverage.

Each panel has only two cables running to it, which the reviewers suggest means the system operates in two channels simultaneously.

Militarnyi thinks it jams navigation, not control

The reviewers' central argument is about what the complex is not. It is unlikely to be aimed at radio-controlled drones near the front line, Militarnyi says, because it can only cover too narrow a band of frequencies for that.

Instead, their version is that it suppresses the satellite navigation of Ukraine's long-range strike drones, which fly on fixed frequencies.

If the navigation-jamming theory is right, each of the two cables might handle a separate antenna polarization, allowing the system to radiate interference in different polarizations and depend less on how a drone's navigation antenna is oriented in flight.

The cables might alternatively be split by frequency — one covering the L1 band (1.5 to 1.6 GHz), the other L2 or L5 (around 1.2 GHz) — so each panel could jam both main signals that multi-band drone receivers rely on.

Why a flying jammer, and why it might work

The one part of Militarnyi's reasoning that rests on a general principle rather than photo-reading concerns why Russia would put this in the air at all.

Long-range strike drones usually carry an inertial navigation system alongside their satellite receiver, Militarnyi notes.

But an inertial system is built to correct for drift only while a drone crosses a relatively small jamming zone, because the inertial unit accumulates its own error over time.

A jammer that can move — loitering in a helicopter along a drone's expected path — could hold a drone inside a suppression zone for longer than a fixed ground station could, forcing the inertial system to coast further and drift more.

On that logic, Militarnyi suggests Russia probably plans to use these helicopters much like the light-aircraft electronic-warfare platforms it already flies.