Europe’s imperialist governments and the NATO military alliance responded hysterically Friday after a Russian drone crashed into a block of flats in Galati, a Romanian city a few miles from the Ukrainian border.

The warmongers in Berlin, Brussels, London, and Paris are intent on exploiting the incident to justify further enflaming the four-year war, as they fund an escalated programme of Ukrainian drone strikes deep into Russian territory.

A Russian drone entered Romanian airspace at about 1:50am local time on Friday, travelling approximately 10 kilometres before crashing into a high-rise block of flats. The ensuing fire injured two people. The Romanian military dismissed criticism over why it had not shot down the drone earlier, claiming that they only had four minutes to react. President Nicușor Da expelled Russia’s consul in the city of Constanta and ordered the consulate closed.

In the major European capitals, political leaders exploited the incident to escalate their furious propaganda campaign for continued war against Russia.

“Russia’s war of aggression has crossed yet another line,” asserted European Union (EU) Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, while NATO Secretary General Marc Rutte denounced Russia’s “reckless behaviour”, which represented “a danger to us all.” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz wrote on X that the incident underscored “Russia’s readiness to escalate,” and added that Germany is ready to “defend every centimetre of allied territory.” Britain’s Keir Starmer and Canada’s Mark Carney issued similar statements.

This is said as European factories and funds—another €90 billion was recently made available—are used to fuel a campaign of Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries and other energy facilities, high-rise residential blocks in Moscow, and supply lines for the Crimean peninsula.

Having lured the Russian government into its reactionary invasion with the threat of NATO membership for a far-right, Russophobic Ukrainian regime, the European imperialists are making good on the opportunity to trade Ukrainian workers’ lives for Russian, to cripple the country.

Estimates suggest that well over half a million Ukrainians have died in the war, while the head of British intelligence GCHQ this week put the number of Russian casualties at 500,000. Whether or not this latter figure is accurate, multiple estimates put the figure in the hundreds of thousands. High casualty rates appear to have stalled Russia’s traditional spring offensive amid Ukraine’s wider usage of drone technology.

The latest escalation began following a Ukrainian strike on 24 May on a vocational school in a Russian-occupied area in Luhansk, killing 21 people. Kiev claimed the target was a military school.

Russia responded with a series of strikes—including one by a supersonic, nuclear-capable Oreshnik missile—that killed four people and hit numerous buildings in Kiev last weekend. On Monday, the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement ordering foreign diplomatic representatives to leave the city ahead of further planned attacks. European governments, including Germany, France, and Britain, refused and called in their respective Russian ambassadors to protest.

The growing intensity of drone strikes between Ukraine and Russia has made incursions into neighbouring countries a regularity, presenting frequent opportunities for the European leaders to warmonger.

Incursions into the airspace of the three Baltic republics Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have principally been due to Ukrainian attack drones forced off course by Russian defences jamming them. The BBC noted that it was “far from impossible” that Ukrainian defences had jammed the drone that strayed into Romania, pushing it off course.

In mid-May, Latvia’s coalition government collapsed after the defence minister was forced to resign over allegations that he mishandled the response to the downing of a Ukrainian drone on Latvian territory. An incident in Lithuania, in which the country’s parliament was evacuated on a drone warning, was used to stage von der Leyen’s declaration, “Let there be no doubt. A threat against one Member State is a threat against our entire Union.”

For its part, Russia warned earlier this year that it could strike targets in NATO territory if the European powers continued to facilitate Ukrainian strikes on Russia.

As well as escalating the war in Ukraine against a nuclear-armed power, the repeated European denunciations of Russian aggression are being used to legitimise an unprecedented rearmament programme across the continent and the transformation of vast swathes of civilian industry into military production. Workers across Europe confront deepening austerity to pay for these war machines.

The imperialist powers are pursuing a reckless course of escalating the war with Russia to secure their economic and geostrategic interests. European governments have grown increasingly belligerent as the rift with US imperialism has grown, forcing them to invest more heavily in the conflict to make up for withdrawn US funds and at the same time prompting fears of a Russian-American deal which leaves them out in the cold.

President Trump has previously tried to secure an accommodation with President Putin over the heads of the Europeans that would give US capital preferential access to Russian raw materials and energy supplies. Last year, Washington concluded a critical minerals agreement with Kiev to codify American control over much of the country’s rare earths and other extractive industries.

The Russian oligarchy for which the Kremlin speaks still holds out the hope of finding such an arrangement.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called US Secretary of State Marco Rubio Monday after his department warned foreign representatives to leave Kiev. He “expressed regret” to Rubio about the impasse in talks led by the US on ending the war, the Foreign Ministry stated. He referred to efforts by Ukraine and the European powers to undermine agreements reached between Trump and Putin at their Alaska summit last August, according to the New York Times.

The European powers, which sacrificed their cheap energy supplies from Russia in 2022 in the belief that waging a joint war with the US would open up new opportunities to plunder the rich natural resources of the former Soviet Union, want to continue the war to put them in a position to reap these spoils. Yesterday the British think tank Chatham House published an article headlined, “How a Russia–Ukraine ceasefire could imperil Ukrainian and European security”.

None of the belligerents represent the interests of any section of the working class. All they have to offer is the subordination of society’s resources to warfare and the threat of mass death.

For the imperialist powers, the Russia-Ukraine war is one front of a global conflict for a redivision of the world, including also the US/Israeli war on Iran and Washington’s preparations for war with China.

The Russian and Ukrainian oligarchies, which emerged from the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union and restoration of capitalism, have shown they are quite prepared to slaughter large numbers of workers and young people for the privilege of securing their position in an imperialist-dominated world capitalist market.

To wage these wars, the ruling class is shredding basic democratic rights and criminalising political opposition. Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, as part of an ongoing and ruthless crackdown, has imprisoned Bogdan Syrotiuk, the 26-year-old leader of the socialist group Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists, for over two years for the “crime” of calling for the unification of Ukrainian and Russian workers to stop the war.

These dangers underscore the urgency of constructing an international anti-war movement led by the working class armed with a socialist programme. This movement must combine opposition to imperialist war around the world in the interests of the banks and corporations with a struggle against the onslaught on workers’ democratic and social rights at home.