President Nicusor Dan says that the Ukrainian sea drone that exploded on Friday in the Romanian Black Sea port of Constanta could not be intercepted as a result of the lack of equipment capable of detecting such threats.

He said on Saturday, at the end of a working session in which the incident caused by the Ukrainian sea drones that exploded in the port of Constanta and off the Black Sea coast was analysed, that, like aerial drones, sea drones are new technologies to which Romania must adapt.

'How prepared is Romania for this type of events? First of all, it is a new technology, which has been developed in the context of this war and not even since the beginning of this war. Just as it did with aerial drones, Romania is adapting to the technology that this war has generated. Romania is in the process of a defence acquisition programme, that is, we are in a process, including - according to the schedule of this acquisition process - on the naval side, even next month some equipment will come to Romania. A few weeks ago, the Romanian Navy participated in a NATO exercise dedicated exactly to this type of threat. So we are in a process of adapting to a new technology. (...) As I said, it is a new technology and we are in exactly the same situation with aerial drones. It is a new technology, developed a year or two ago. Romania is not the only country that has had events of this kind, and we are all adapting together for this type of technologies.'

The President added that the information held by Romania regarding the movement of the sea drone from the Black Sea to the Port of Constanta 'has a degree of probability.'

'Of course, there is some information with a degree of probability, but at this moment I don't want to deal with hypotheses. What I can say is that those images that we have all seen either on TV or on social media need a factual confirmation and it will be done. The main difficulty comes from the fact that the technology that we were all using, radars and everything else, was for larger objects for which the signal is strong enough. The difficulty with drones and air and sea drones, as was the case yesterday, is that normal radars do not see them. That is why we cannot say what the trajectory it followed during the day was. (...) I can tell you that there are many categories of equipment that allow the detection of these drones. What I'm telling you is that the radars that we were used to and that work perfectly against airplanes are not adjusted for drones and then you have to have other types of equipment, with a smaller observation range around them with which to detect drones,' the President said. AGERPRES (RO - editing by: Cristian Lupascu; EN - writing by: Corneliu-Aurelian Colceriu)