Moldova has contradicted Norway's prime minister over how close a Russian drone came to Volodymyr Zelenskiy's aircraft, saying it crashed about 160 km from the airport.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store told broadcaster NRK on September 9 that the Ukrainian president's plane "was nearly hit by a drone as it was taking off from Moldova", adding: "That is the reality he lives in." The remark was made in Oslo, where Zelenskiy had arrived the previous evening for the funeral of King Harald V, and it was picked up around the world within hours.

Store's own office narrowed the claim the same evening. State Secretary Bhanuja Rasiah told NRK that there had been a drone threat in Moldovan airspace that delayed the flight to Oslo, and that it was uncertain how close the drones had come to the aircraft.

Moldovan government spokesperson Dumitru Ciorici then put a distance on it. He said Moldova closed its airspace on the Tuesday afternoon to protect aircraft that were overhead at the time, which delayed three departures including Zelenskiy's, and that there was no direct threat to the presidential plane, which stayed on the ground throughout, Scripps News reported.

The drone came down in a sunflower field in the northern Riscani district, roughly 160 km from Chisinau International Airport, starting four fires and injuring nobody. Moldovan police said the fragments resembled a Geran-type drone, the Russian-built loitering munition used in nightly attacks on Ukraine.

Ukraine's ambassador to Norway, Oleksiy Gavrysh, confirmed the incident to NRK a little over a day later in terms narrower than Store's. "I can confirm that a Russian drone flew in the airspace over the airport in Moldova, before it flew on," he said. He added that he did not know of any comparable case in which a Russian drone had been observed in the same place as the Ukrainian president's aircraft.

The disruption on the ground was real enough whatever the distance. NRK reported that the airspace over Chisinau closed shortly after 16:30 local time, that three aircraft had to wait to take off and four could not land, and that the Starokozache border crossing was shut overnight. Moldova's civil aviation traffic is small, and a single afternoon closure at its only international airport of any size removes most of the day's remaining movements.

The pattern behind the closure is what Chisinau has been complaining about for months. Moldovan Prime Minister Vasile Tofan has said 17 drones came down on Moldovan territory in August alone, and the country has no air defence capable of stopping them.

That gap is the reason Norway was hosting the conversation at all. Zelenskiy used his meetings in Oslo with Store, Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg and Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide to press for more air defence, and confirmed afterwards that they had discussed Freya, the interceptor programme being developed by the Ukrainian firm Fire Point as a cheaper substitute for the American Patriot. Norway is one of nine European countries that joined Ukraine in an anti-ballistic missile coalition in July alongside Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK.

The correction was seized on by accounts hostile to Ukraine, among them the French politician Florian Philippot, who called the episode fake news, and by Russian state media. The substance of it, though, came from the Moldovan government rather than from either of those quarters, and from the Norwegian prime minister's own office.

What is left standing is narrower than the headline that travelled and more useful. A Russian drone crossed into Moldova on the afternoon a foreign head of state was due to fly out, the state closed its airspace because it had no other tool, and commercial and government aviation stopped for the afternoon. That is the cost of the incursions as they are actually incurred, and it lands on Moldova rather than on Ukraine.