Zelensky Speaks: Chinese Airlines Still Flying Moscow's Routes
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called on international airlines — specifically naming Chinese and Gulf state carriers — to stop using Russian airspace, as Kyiv escalates its long-range drone operations against Russian territory, according to the BBC.
Zelensky Speaks: Chinese Airlines Still Flying Moscow's Routes
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called on international airlines — specifically naming Chinese and Gulf state carriers — to stop using Russian airspace, as Kyiv escalates its long-range drone operations against Russian territory, according to the BBC.
The appeal reframes the war's economic geography in terms that Beijing will find uncomfortable. Chinese airlines have continued transiting Russian airspace for routes into Europe, a logistical convenience that saves time and fuel but now carries a political cost Zelensky is determined to make visible. Gulf carriers face the same calculation.
The timing is not accidental. Kyiv's drone campaign has pushed deeper into Russian territory in recent weeks, and Moscow has responded by threatening to intensify its own strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure. The airspace Zelensky is asking the world to abandon is the same airspace Ukrainian drones are increasingly treating as contested territory.
For civilian carriers, the request is a commercial dilemma wrapped in a geopolitical one — each flight that transits Russian airspace generates overflight fees that flow directly into a wartime economy. Zelensky's argument, left unstated but unmistakable, is that neutrality has a price tag, and the airlines are paying it to the wrong side.
The European Union has already banned Russian overflight. The gap in that embargo is precisely where the pressure now lands — on partners who calculated they could stay above the conflict, at thirty-seven thousand feet.
