Never sworn enemies but not the warmest of neighbors either, Bucharest and Kyiv are today probably closer than they have been in years, if not decades.
The reason? Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Putting aside issues of land and language, Romania is now one of Ukraine’s staunchest allies, capped with the two signing a 10-year security agreement in July. Bucharest supplies not only military aid — although much of it remains hush-hush for security reasons — but also trains Ukrainian fighter pilots, and soon, marines.
And with Ukrainian trade routes cut off, Romania has also become a key conduit to global markets for Ukrainian grain and other goods.
In part due to that support and the country’s proximity to the conflict, Romania, which shares a 650-kilometer-plus border with Ukraine, has registered more Russian military drones flying over or crashing into its territory than any other state on the edge of the conflict, judging by media reports.
Romania, which is spending like never before on defense, is also becoming more strategically integral to NATO amid an eastward shift to face what the Western military alliance deems the biggest threat to European security: Russia.
“I think it’s quite clear that Romania’s strategic importance has been increasing tremendously since the beginning of the war,” said Oana Popescu-Zamfir, director of the GlobalFocus Center, a think tank in Bucharest.
“We’ve been complaining for a long time that there was less attention given to the Black Sea as compared to the northeastern [NATO] flank. And we still feel that there isn’t enough and there’s not a clear strategy, a clear allied strategy for the Black Sea in the context of Russia’s aggressiveness. But, still, a lot of progress has been made,” Popescu-Zamfir told RFE/RL.
Patriot To The Rescue
A Romanian Defense Ministry spokesperson confirmed to RFE/RL’s Romanian Service on October 3 that Ukraine had taken possession of a Patriot air defense system from Bucharest. Romania signed a contract in 2017 with the U.S. company Raytheon and took its first delivery in 2020. It now has just one operational system.
Ukraine is one of the world’s biggest grain exporters.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who personally thanked Romania for the delivery, has long appealed for more Patriot systems, arguing that they will help his forces fight almost 3,000 bombs that he said Russia launches into the country every month. Up to now, Ukraine has reportedly operated an estimated five Patriots: two from the United States and three from Germany.
Unlike the Patriot delivery, much of the military hardware Romania has supplied to Ukraine is classified. However, according to media reports and analysts that military aid has included APRA-40 rocket launchers, TAB-71 armored vehicles, and artillery shells.
In addition, Bucharest has started training Ukrainian pilots, as the Ukrainian Defense Ministry confirmed on September 12. Ukraine has been long requesting F-16 fighter jets from its allies to bolster its dwindling fleet of Soviet-era MiGs.
The Ukrainian pilots are training at the European F-16 Training Center (EFTC), which opened in November 2023 at a Romanian military air base near the southeastern town of Fetesti. It will also serve as a regional F-16 training hub for NATO allies and partners.
Romania has also announced plans to train Ukrainian marines. The two-year program is scheduled for Air Base 71, also known as Campia Turzii, in central Romania. The idea was hatched by the Ukraine Defense Contact Group — also known as the Ramstein group — which is an alliance of 57 countries (all 32 NATO member states and 25 other countries). Backed by Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, the plan was approved overwhelmingly by Romania’s parliament on October 1.
Economically, Romania has also become crucial to Ukraine, one of the world’s biggest grain exporters. Ukraine began using Romania’s Black Sea port of Constanta after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 halted shipments from its own Black Sea ports.
It exported 14 million metric tons of grain through Constanta in 2023, roughly 40 percent of the port’s entire grain shipments for the year, up from 8.6 million tons in 2022.
However, transit volumes from Constanta fell in the second part of the year after Russia repeatedly struck Ukrainian river ports that li on the other side of the Danube from Romania. Ukraine is also using another route to ship grain, hugging the coast of the Black Sea. That route is now overshadowing Constanta’s importance for Ukraine but still highlights the country’s growing cooperation.
“The relatively smooth cooperation between Romania and Ukraine in expanding export routes via the Black Sea and Danube Delta has fostered mutual trust. Romania is Ukraine’s neighbor that handles by far the biggest volume of agricultural exports,” said Simon Schlegel, a senior Ukraine analyst at the International Crisis Group.
“While adapting these key export routes to the additional wartime burden was not a frictionless process, Kyiv and Bucharest share an interest in strengthening Romania’s port infrastructure,” Schlegel told RFE/RL in e-mailed remarks.
Romania, NATO Relations Rising
Meanwhile, Romania’s relations with NATO have accelerated as well. Bucharest announced earlier this year that upgrade work had begun at the Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base on the Black Sea. The project, first announced in 2019, aims to transform the base into a major NATO hub, accommodating advanced jet fighters and up to 10,000 NATO troops.
“It’s going to be the largest [NATO] base outside of Turkish territory. And the reason this is important is…because Turkey is playing a much more complex game, and sometimes it’s not very easy for NATO allies to rely on Turkey, and definitely not for Romania, which feels that the Black Sea remains a closed sea because of Turkey and the way they use the Montreux Convention to make sure that they actually divide influence with Russia in the Black Sea, and don’t really allow any other external influence,” said Popescu-Zamfir, referring to the document regulating maritime traffic through the Turkish Straits.
Despite its membership of NATO, Turkey has been accused of not taking stronger action against Russian naval auxiliary vessels moving through its waters, and the Turkish government has not imposed sanctions on Moscow’s seaborne exports.
Moscow is not thrilled with the plan to revamp the air base.
The bigger the NATO base and the “closer it is to Russia’s borders, the more likely it is to be among the first targets for retaliatory strikes,” Russian Senator Andrei Klimov said in March. “There won’t be any benefit for Romania from this, and there will be more threats. This is a fact.”
Romania is used to such Russian threats. In 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that positioning U.S. missiles in neighboring countries like Romania would lead to retaliatory measures from Russia. His comments came as Romania installed a U.S. missile defense system at the Deveselu military base, also on the Black Sea.
But Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has only triggered more fears, more defense spending, and more integration with NATO and its members. Romania, which joined the alliance in 2004, is allocating a record 19 billion euros ($20.7 billion) in defense spending in 2024, exceeding NATO’s spending target of 2 percent of gross domestic product.
Romania now possesses the second largest military on NATO’s eastern flank (75,000 troops versus Poland’s 122,500), but much of its military hardware is Soviet-era, although that has been changing. In one of the biggest modernizing deals to date, Romania is to acquire 32 F-35 fighter aircraft from the United States, the Pentagon announced in September, in an agreement worth $7.2 billion. In May 2023, Romania retired the last of its MiG jets and now flies mostly F-16s.
Romania’s strategic importance on NATO’s eastern flank was underscored when the military alliance in March 2022 agreed to deploy battalions to four more eastern NATO members: Romania, along with Bulgaria, Hungary, and Slovakia. They joined the four battalions created by NATO in 2016 and based in (but including personnel from multiple NATO members): Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland — two years after Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimea and began backing separatists in eastern Ukraine.
The two countries have sometimes had fraught relations, and public attitudes in Romania on Ukraine and Russia’s war may be mixed thanks in part to history, said Popescu-Zamfir.
Romania lost the northern part of Bukovyna and parts of Bessarabia — now in today’s Ukraine — in 1940 thanks to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, an agreement between the Nazi and Soviet powers not to attack one other and to divide up Eastern Europe into spheres of influence. It is history that still reverberates today. When Zelenskiy gave a speech in 2019 describing the inclusion of northern Bukovyna in Romania in 1919 after World War I, Romania’s Foreign Ministry issued an official protest.
The two countries have also tussled over minority rights. An estimated 151,000 ethnic Romanians live in Ukraine, mainly in the border regions of Chernivtsi and Zakarpattya. That’s not counting the estimated 259,000 people living in Chernivtsi and the Odesa region whom Kyiv considers Moldovans, but Bucharest views as Romanians, arguing that the distinction between the two is artificial.
But polling shows most Romanians back their country’s inclusion in Western institutions, and Popescu-Zamfir adds that much of the country’s political elite are hawkish when it comes to Ukraine.
“I think really now we have a consensus about, essentially, you know, our interests are inextricably linked with Ukraine’s,” Popescu-Zamfir said. “We’re on the same side of things because Russia is on the other side. So that makes things much more black and white, and this is where we need to stand.”