Croatia seeks answers after Russian-made drone crash

A RUSSIAN-MADE military drone crashed in the Croatian capital Zagreb and damaged several vehicles but no one was injured, officials said yesterday.

“A military drone produced by Russia, according to our information, crashed”, prime minister Andrej Plenković said.

“At this moment we do not know exactly whether it was owned by the Russian or Ukrainian army,” added Plenković, who spoke to Croatian reporters in Versailles where he is attending a European Union summit.

The drone entered Croatia’s airspace from Hungary, the prime minister said.

He cited Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as saying it had entered Hungary from Romania, Plenković added.

All three countries are Nato members.

Local media earlier quoted military aviation experts as saying the device could have been a Soviet-era Tu-141 reconnaissance drone used by Ukraine.

Mr Plenković added the cause of the incident had not yet been determined.

Zagreb also contacted Kyiv to ask whether it had any information on the drone, which crashed around 11pm local time on Thursday.

Croatia’s chief of defence, Admiral Robert Hranj, labelled it a “pretty serious incident” and said Zagreb was discussing the incident with Nato.

A Nato official said that the military alliance’s “integrated air and missile defence tracked the flight path of an object which subsequently crashed in Zagreb”.

Croatia is investigating the incident, the official said.

Local security experts labelled the incident a Nato failure as the drone flew undisturbed over its three member states before crashing.

Zoran Milanović, the Croatian president, demanded an investigation into how it could have flown for “nearly an hour over a Nato member territory without anyone noticing it”.