Russian aviation rules keep shutting Moscow airports as drones appear overhead

A safety regulation written to protect Russian aircraft is now the main reason Moscow's airports stop flying. Rosaviatsiya's carpet protocol closes airspace over a region or an airport whenever an aircraft violates Russian airspace, weapons are used or unidentified objects appear. Strict limits follow for all traffic. The procedure has triggered repeatedly this month because Ukrainian drones are appearing in the sky.

The independent investigative outlet Agentstvo reported that Domodedovo, Sheremetyevo, Zhukovsky and Vnukovo have suspended operations almost every day in October. On some days, the four airports were closed for as long as nine hours.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy set the goal in early September, saying Ukraine would seek to cut off the airspace around Moscow and other Russian destinations. Speaking to airlines, insurers and travelers, he said: "Russian airspace will become completely unsafe." Ukraine sent the same warning to the International Civil Aviation Organization the following day. Ukraine's own airspace has been shut since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Oleksandr Laneckij, chief executive of the consultancy Friendly Avia Support, told DW that "essentially, every drone poses a military threat." He compared the disruption to Yemen's Houthis and their effect on Saudi airspace, and said Ukraine's military capabilities far exceed theirs.

Military analyst Jan Matvejev said triggering the carpet protocol requires only simple drones without warheads or long range, and that Ukraine's arms industry can produce hundreds of combat-ready long-range drones a day. He added that Russia's air defenses are not fully effective against them. "If it were possible to shoot them down, they would have done so by now," he said, noting that Russia would have deployed more air-defense troops if it had them. Writing in The Atlantic in October, Simon Shuster, citing well-informed sources, described Ukraine's efforts as "just getting started."

Both experts pointed to risks for civilian flights. Laneckij said Russia might lower the threshold for declaring the carpet protocol, raising the danger of an incident like the 2024 Christmas day crash of an Azerbaijan Airlines flight. Investigators say that aircraft was hit by a Russian air-defense missile fired to counter drones, killing 38 people. Matvejev said little has changed in Russia's air-defense protocol since then. Against a low-flying drone shot with a machine gun, he said, the risk to aircraft is extremely low, but missiles carry a different danger. He also said a drone flown from Ukraine to Moscow must be fairly large, "weighting dozens of kilograms," because a collision with an airplane can be serious.

Laneckij said whether foreign airlines keep flying to Russia depends on three factors: the military threat, demand and insurance costs. If insurers rate the risk as very high, they could raise premiums sharply and push ticket prices up. Russia's aviation market has already shrunk as many airlines went out of business, which has lifted demand for seats on the remaining foreign carriers. "Whether they stay or not depends on the price they have to pay for the danger faced," he said.

Disruption has reached other airports. Ukrainian forces attacked the Pskov airport in the summer of 2023, and drone debris fell on Sochi airport earlier this month. Russia has struck Ukrainian airports too; in September, Zelenskyy said Kyiv's airport and Boryspil, near the capital, were hit.