A midnight drone strike on Britain’s Akrotiri air base in Cyprus forced the island’s government to shelve an informal meeting of EU European-affairs ministers scheduled for 2 March, Cyprus Mail reports.
Cyprus currently holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union and had hoped to showcase its diplomatic clout in Nicosia. Instead, officials spent the morning scrambling to contact delegations already en route, while air-traffic controllers assessed the skies above the eastern Mediterranean.
Authorities said the unmanned aircraft, identified as an Iranian-made Shahed, caused only minor damage. Cyprus insisted the island was not the intended target, yet commercial carriers diverted flights and insurers jacked up premiums. The presidency concluded that ministers, along with representatives of the European Commission, the European Parliament and the United Kingdom, could not arrive safely. “Given this unanticipated development which has unfortunately impacted today’s flights to Cyprus, the Cyprus Presidency has decided to postpone the informal GAC to a later date,” a presidency spokesperson said on Monday morning.
Unfriendly skies
The agenda had been weighty: the next seven-year EU budget, enlargement to Ukraine and Moldova, and new tools for countering foreign disinformation. Britain was to join a session on the embryonic “European democracy shield”. Candidate countries also held invitations.
Cypriot officials offered no replacement date. Two further gatherings—a cultural-policy conclave and a security-and-defence conference—remain on the calendar, though diplomats expect another review if regional tensions persist. President Nikos Christodoulides reiterated that Cyprus would not take part in any military action and sought to reassure tourists starting their spring holidays.
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European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen rang Mr Christodoulides within hours of the strike. “Let me be clear: we stand collectively, firmly and unequivocally with our member states in the face of any threat,” she wrote on social media.
For Brussels the episode is awkward. Budget talks were already fractious; now they drift further. More troubling is the reminder that conflict in the Gulf can ground European decision-making as surely as it rattles oil markets.
