CINCU, Romania — Move over, Dracula. Transylvania has a new villain.

In the rugged, forested mountains of central Romania, 5,000 NATO troops gathered to fight off a make-believe enemy. In what the alliance billed as a “show of force,” two French Puma helicopters dropped from the clouds, skimming low over the hills as tanks and howitzers rolled into position and fighter jets and drones streaked across the sky.

“The scenario’s main goal is deterrence,” said Maj. Gen. Dorin Toma, commander of NATO’s Multinational Division South-East. The target of that message is no secret: Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The exercise was part of an annual drill known as Dacian Fall, but this year’s edition — which wrapped Thursday — carried extra weight. Part of NATO’s race to reinforce Europe’s eastern flank, it comes just a few weeks after Washington’s announced it will sharply reduce U.S. troop levels in Romania — even as European defense and intelligence officials warn that Moscow could test the alliance’s resolve within the next few years.

Romania, which borders Ukraine, Moldova and the Black Sea, is home to several NATO bases. Since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it has hosted a NATO multinational battlegroup led by France and including Spain, Belgium and Luxembourg. 

In November, the Pentagon said it would redeploy an infantry brigade of around 800 troops back to Kentucky from Romania, as the U.S. military reorients its focus to domestic priorities like border protection and the Indo-Pacific region. Some 1,000 U.S. troops will stay in the country, as part of bilateral defense agreement between Washington and Bucharest. 

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, Romanian top officials and the Trump administration have downplayed the implications of the decision. But Romania’s State Secretary for Defense Sorin Moldova recently told POLITICO that the U.S. should “overturn” the drawdown.

The American troop reduction is not expected to have a military impact — “For the guys in the trenches, it’s no big deal,” a Romanian high-ranking military officer told POLITICO — but as a political symbol, some worry it could embolden Putin to test his luck. Earlier this week, debris from a Russian drone targeting Ukraine landed on Romanian soil, the latest in a string of similar incidents.

The drawdown “will have limited operational implications,” said Anca Agachi, a policy analyst at the RAND research institute. “It’s the strategic signaling the alliance needs to worry about.” Exercises like Dacian Fall need to “signal deterrence,” she said.

Military mobility

The exercise is designed to demonstrate that NATO allies are ready to work together to reinforce the eastern flank — and to propagate lessons from the war in Ukraine.

In responding to Russian aggression, speed will be essential. In one of the French army’s largest deployments, Paris scrambled troops and military equipment to Romania within NATO’s 10-day deadline. Under NATO requirements, France must be able to deploy a war-ready division on the eastern flank in 30 days by 2027. 

“For the first time, we decided to use a ship. It took us two days to reach Greece, then two to three more days to cross Bulgaria,” said Gen. Maxime Do Tran, the commander of the French armored brigade that participated in the exercise. Other troops made the journey on five planes, 11 trains and about 15 convoys. 

While moving across air, land and sea was relatively seamless, “the train transportation was a bit more difficult because in peacetime, we were not prioritized to cross the border,” Do Tran said. Next week, the European Commission is expected to unveil a proposal to ease movement of military personnel and weaponry.

Soldiers on site deployed equipment from across the alliance: German Eurofighters, Romanian F-16s, High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems rocket launchers, Caesar self-propelled howitzers, and Mistral air defense systems.

And drones. Lots of drones. “Dacian Fall is a very good platform for each nation to make experiments and test new equipment,” said Maj. Gen. Toma. For the first time in a large-scale drill, Romanian military officers tested Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones. Other unmanned aerial vehicles included drones providing targeting information for troops on the ground, as well as suicide drones and FPV models widely used in Ukraine.

Filling the gap

NATO officials were keen to stress that the U.S. has not left the country. American troops provided air support for the exercise. “We’re here as a willing partner, and we’ll stand beside Romania,” said Lt. Col. Christopher Stroup from the U.S. Air Force.

However, the drawdown means Romania will need its European allies to step up, said Oana Lungescu, a former NATO spokesperson and a distinguished fellow with the Royal United Services Institute think tank. The U.S. decision is “an opportunity for France and other Europeans to consider how they can contribute even more presence and show that they are indeed stepping up,” she said.

In the past three years, Paris and Bucharest have deepened military ties. Catherine Vautrin, France’s newly appointed armed forces minister, went to Romania last month in one of her first trips abroad. But so far, Paris has not announced plans to boost its presence in Romania.

The shift is a moment of reckoning for Bucharest, which has long staked its defense strategy on U.S. support. Romania has invested heavily in American-made Patriot air defense systems, F-35 fighters and Abrams tanks, and has consistently prioritized its transatlantic partnership.

“Romania has been focusing for decades on the strategic partnership with the U.S.,” Lungescu stressed. “It’s also an opportunity to diversify in terms of deployments, training and capabilities.”

On the cold November afternoon at the end of the exercise, the artillery smoke had cleared and the Transylvanian mountains had gone quiet. The French troops that had crossed the continent to be there were packing their things and preparing to go home — for now.