ZAGREB, 12 March 2022 - Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković will visit the NATO base near Madrid on Wednesday and meet with its commander in connection with aviation control, a government source told Hina on Saturday.
Plenković is going to Madrid for a bilateral meeting with his Spanish counterpart Pedro Sanchez, who visited Zagreb last October.
The Spanish military base at Torrejón de Ardoz, 20 kilometres northeast of Madrid, is used by NATO to monitor the skies of its southern member states, including Croatia.
Although the Combined Air Operations Centre Torrejón is tasked with identifying unknown flying objects, it did not report or react to an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that entered Croatia's air space on Thursday night.
The UAV is a Soviet-era TU-141 which was launched from Ukraine and crashed in the Croatian capital after flying over Romania and Hungary, both NATO members.
A source at the Torrejón base, which is manned with staff from 17 NATO nations, including Croatia, said today that "everyone is gathering data" and that analysis would take a certain time.
In Madrid, Plenković will also meet with King Felipe VI and the Spanish parliament speaker.
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