A flurry of excavators and trucks plowed through Dobruja, the vast plateau overlooking the Black Sea in eastern Romania. In the middle of this dry and not very fertile landscape, the machines were already digging, terracing and tracing out what will be a runway here, and taxiways for airplanes there. "What do you think?" asked Captain Engineer Aurel Bocai on Thursday, July 25, as he proudly toured the gigantic construction site, which had only begun a month and a half earlier.

An officer in the Romanian Air Force, he is the project manager for what he described quite simply as "the biggest construction project undertaken by the Romanian army since the 1990s." If the 250 machines deployed six days a week continue at this pace, NATO aircraft could be landing and taking off as early as 2027 on what will be the second runway of the Mihail Koğalniceanu Air Base. Built during the communist era, this military base located 30 kilometers from the Black Sea has had a new lease of life since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Facing Crimea, the "MK" base – as it is called by the many foreign soldiers deployed here for fear of mispronouncing the name of the 19^th-century Romanian political figure the base is named after – is NATO's easternmost base in Europe. Long abandoned, this complex of rusting old hangars and buildings, sometimes overgrown with vegetation, has become one of the most strategic locations for surveillance of the Black Sea and air protection of NATO's "eastern flank" in the face of the Russian threat.

'Fourfold increase' in surface area

Between the old buildings, container villages have been hastily erected, notably by the French army, which still uses MK to supply its ground forces deployed at Cincu in central Romania. Added to this are the countless sand-colored Humvee military vehicles and American Tomahawk missiles, while Finnish fighter jets currently responsible for policing Romania's skies share the single runway with low-cost aircraft from the nearby civilian airport serving Constanta, a large port city in eastern Romania.

"Before 2022, there were mostly sunflower fields here," explained Commander Nicolae Cretu, a tall, dark-haired man, pointing out on the large aerial view spread out on his desk the plots that are now occupied by machinery or barracks belonging to NATO military forces. Agreed on back in 2018, "in reaction to what happened in Georgia and Crimea [annexed by Russia in 2014]," the extension will transform all these temporary facilities into permanent accommodations and seriously increase capacity."

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