A new steel curtain extends a large part of the European airspace after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Twenty countries, including Spain, France Italy, Belgium and Germany, has decided to close its heavens to Russian airlines.
Spain has just announced, thus following the example of numerous countries that have done it between yesterday and this morning.
“Spain will proceed at the closure of the airspace to Russian airlines. Following the cooperation guidelines marked by the European Union, this measure will have effects on flights operated by Russian airlines that use Spanish airspace,” said the Ministry of Transportation.
On twitter.
Among these companies is Aeroflot, the main airline in the country, but also others like S7 Airlines.
Russia, on the other hand, has done the same with the countries that have taken this measure and has also closed their airspace to airlines from these states.
Since Thursday all airlines have already been forbidden Ukraine, but also countries such as Moldova, Belarus and part of Russia, for security reasons.
Since yesterday, restrictions on Russian companies as a punishment for the invasion have gone in waterfall: they announced yesterday Germany, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, Bulgaria, Poland, and Czech Republic, and today Spain, France, Italy, have been added
Belgium, Ireland, Finland, Luxembourg, Sweden, Iceland, Austria (which is not a member of NATO) and Denmark.
Companies such as Lufthansa or British Airways had already said that they will not fly over Russian space, as well as Air France, which will temporarily suspend their flights to China and Japan until it does not find alternative routes to fly over the Russian territory.
Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, countries that are precisely absorbing part of the traffic diverted by the closure of Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus, will only allow Russian airlines to enter their airspace for emergency landings and humanitarian flights.
The Baltic countries had already banned since the past spring the flights from Belarus after the Belarusian President ordered to deviate to Minsk, the capital, to a Ryanair plane that covered the Athens-Vilnian route to arrest the opposition journalist, Roman
Protevich
This partial and selective closure of the European skies supposes a new blow for an air sector that began to draw his head after two years of pandemic.
It has been the sector most affected by the restrictions on mobility and the brutal collapse of passenger traffic.
Now the war is attached, which yields more uncertainty to these companies, not only for all these closures, but because of the possibility that it affects the demand and reserves falling for summer, and by the rise in the price of oil, which
It also has an impact on the accounts accounts of airlines that, in some cases, already resist thanks to the public rescues of their respective governments.
