Drone in Moldova, timeline rules out risk of collision with Zelensky's plane
Official timings show that the Russian aircraft had already crashed forty minutes before the Ukrainian president's plane took off from Chisinau, bound for Harald V's funeral.
The newspaper had reported on September 10 on Zelensky’s arrival in Oslo among the leaders present at the state funeral of King Harald V. A reconstruction based on official timings now clarifies an episode linked to that trip: the alarm raised in the following hours over an alleged risk to the Ukrainian presidential plane is not borne out by the actual timing of events.
The Russian drone, a Shahed model, entered Moldovan airspace at 4:20 pm on September 8. At that moment Zelensky’s plane was due to depart from Chisinau around 4:30 pm, according to the same timeline. Moldovan airspace was closed for around one hour as a precaution, and the drone crashed at 5:15 pm, 160 kilometers from the capital’s airport.
The Ukrainian presidential plane, however, only began moving at 5:47 pm and actually took off at 5:58 pm — by which time the drone had already been on the ground for over forty minutes. The timeline, if confirmed, places the potential threat and the plane’s departure in two separate, non-overlapping time windows.
Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre had described a much closer episode: “Zelensky’s plane was nearly hit by a drone while taking off from Moldova,” he said in the days following the Oslo funeral. A Ukrainian presidential office official called that account “exaggerated.”
Official Moldovan sources confirmed the timeline and the absence of a direct threat to the aircraft. The Kremlin, too, according to the reconstruction, confirmed that no direct threat to the Ukrainian presidential plane occurred: this is a Russian state source and its version should be read as an attributed statement, not as an independent finding.
The news currently comes from a single source (Open); no independent confirmation is available on the timeline reconstruction as a whole. What remains, however, is a fact distinct from the parties’ statements: over forty minutes elapsed between the drone’s crash at 5:15 pm and the Ukrainian plane’s takeoff at 5:58 pm, according to the official timings cited in the reconstruction.
Kremlin (Russian state source).
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