On the menu today: Russia’s “accidental” military drone incursions into NATO territory have escalated, causing injuries to Romanian citizens. Some ominous new figures indicate that Americans’ credit card debt has grown unsustainable. And speaking of tight finances, an offer you’re not going to want to miss. Read on.
Russian Drone Strikes Apartment Building in NATO Member Romania
Last night, Russia launched a drone that hit an apartment building and injured two people in Galati, Romania, a NATO member country.
This is the statement from the Romanian Defense Ministry:
A drone entered the Romanian airspace, was tracked by radar systems as far as the Southern area of Galați municipality, and crashed onto the roof of a residential apartment building, the impact causing a fire.
Specialized teams from the General Inspectorate for Emergency Situations and other Ministry of Internal Affairs structures, the Romanian Intelligence Service and the Romanian Police are operating at the scene.
Ministry of National Defense radar systems detected drones flying in the vicinity of the Romanian airspace. Two F-16 aircraft on Romanian Air Policing combat service scrambled at 01:19 from the 86th Air Base in Fetești, supported by an IAR 330 SOCAT helicopter of the Romanian Air Force. The pilots were authorized to engage targets throughout the duration of the alert.
Galati is about 14 miles from the nearest border post with Ukraine. And that stretch of the Romanian-Ukrainian border isn’t exactly full of people or military targets. It’s about as far from the front and any legitimate military targets as you could get.
Matthew Whitaker, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, posted on X last night, “We stand with our NATO Ally Romania and condemn this reckless incursion on its territory. Our thoughts are with the injured in Galati. We will defend every inch of NATO territory.”
Sometimes drones accidentally cross into another country’s airspace. And sometimes countries send drones into another country’s airspace to test their responses.
Earlier this month, ABC News reported:
Data provided to ABC News by Romania’s Defense Ministry shows that the rate of Russian attacks on Ukrainian targets close to the NATO frontier is increasing, resulting in more regular scrambling of NATO fighters for defensive missions, more violations of NATO airspace by Russian drones and the discovery of more munition fragments on allied territory.
Romania has now had 28 confirmed Russian airspace violations. On September 9 and 10, at least 19 Russian drones “accidentally” violated Polish airspace; several were shot down.
When something keeps happening repeatedly, does it stop looking so accidental?
I’ve crossed Ukraine’s borders with Poland and Moldova six times. While that’s hardly a comprehensive evaluation of their shared borders, the spots I’ve visited just don’t have that much out there; it’s mostly farmland or wilderness. The Polish border with Belarus — at least the spot with the border wall that I visited — was just swamps, forest, farms, and small towns. Ukraine doesn’t have a lot of military equipment or manpower that it can spare to post along the borders of friendly NATO countries. Heck, the stretch of Ukrainian border with “Transnistria” — a pro-Russian Soviet-nostalgic breakaway region of Moldova — was basically just a fence on a hill.
In other words, it’s very hard to believe that all these Russian drones were aiming for legitimate military targets on Ukrainian territory near the border with NATO countries, overshot their targets, and just happened to stray into NATO airspace. It’s much more likely that at least some of these drones are probing missions, measuring how quickly and effectively NATO air defenses and aircraft can respond to an incursion.
Except now some of the probing drones are crashing into Romanian apartment buildings. This is how gray-zone warfare works. First, the targeted country “gets used” to regular drone incursions; then, after a while, the Russians push the envelope further, aiming for the targeted country to “get used” to these drones “accidentally” hitting civilian targets.
If the Mexican government launched a military drone and it “accidentally” hit an apartment building in El Paso, Texas, how would Americans respond?
For two weeks, thanks to the generous invitation of the embassies of Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland, I told you about this increasingly serious and dangerous “gray zone” warfare from Russia against NATO member countries. During my trip, one of the primary concerns mentioned was the risk of diverted Ukrainian drones accidentally hitting unintended targets in NATO countries’ territories. The Ukrainian military launches drones from their territory; sometimes they send them directly into Russia, but sometimes they send them north over Poland or Belarus and the Baltic states, veering east over the Gulf of Finland, often aiming to hit targets connected to Russia’s energy industry around Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Russia’s electronic countermeasures can send the drones off course. But there is also some concerning speculation that the Ukrainian drones are now functionally close to autonomous — meaning they are launched, and the visual targeting system makes its decision about when it recognizes the target; or a site it believes is the target, in the case of the fuel storage depot in Rēzekne, Latvia — and descends and detonates.
Lots of Americans Face a Credit Card Debt Crisis
Is credit card spending being “through the roof” good news? I suppose if you’re a credit card company. And yes, every company that relies on consumer spending would prefer that American households keep splurging rather than trying to cut back. But is that good news for an administration and its aligned slim congressional majorities who were elected to deal with frustration with the high cost of living?
The Wall Street Journal, this morning:
In the first quarter of this year, the percentage of credit-card balances that were at least 90 days delinquent rose to 13.12 percent, according to data released in May by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That’s the highest level in 15 years, and the most since the period following the 2008 financial crisis.
…Average interest rates on cards rose to 21 percent in February, from 14.6 percent in February 2022, according to a survey of credit-card issuing banks by the Federal Reserve.
Last year, 5.6 percent of credit-card holders were 60 days or more behind on their payments, surpassing prepandemic levels, according to data compiled by Breno Braga, an economist with the Urban Institute, a left-of-center research group. Over the past two years, his analysis showed, the rate rose to its highest level since 2018 for residents of lower, middle and upper-income communities alike.
When I write that the current state of the economy is subpar, readers write in and say that in their neck of the woods, they see people dining out in restaurants, people at amusement parks and taking out their boats, and all kinds of signs of the economy being “normal,” if not prosperous and thriving.
First, even during an economic hard time, some businesses will be profitable. In 1939, the U.S. was in the latter stages of the Great Depression, with unemployment at 17 percent. Yet the movie Gone With the Wind sold more than 200 million tickets and made, in today’s dollars, about $3.5 billion.
Second, when you go downtown and see full tables at an expensive restaurant, you don’t see the credit card debt of the diners.
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