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The last time the world debated whether civilian aircraft should fly over an active conflict zone in eastern Europe, 298 people died. One hundred and ninety-six of them were Malaysian. That history makes Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s warning this week something more than a routine wartime advisory, at least for readers in Kuala Lumpur.
In his nightly video address on Tuesday, Zelensky told airlines still operating through Russian airspace that they are flying into escalating danger. “We want to warn every airline that uses Russian airspace, every insurer, everyone who still uses key Russian airports: the Russian sky is becoming completely dangerous,” he said. His message was direct: Ukraine intends to put drones over Russia “on a scale that has to be taken into account,” and the consequences for civilian aviation are a matter of physics and probability, not intent.
How Ukraine Closes Airspace Without Targeting It
The mechanism Zelensky is exploiting is a feature of Russia’s own air defence doctrine. Under a protocol called “Kovyor,” meaning carpet, Russian authorities suspend all commercial flights in a given zone the moment a drone is detected nearby. Ukraine does not need to aim at airports to shut them down. It simply needs to put drones in the air in sufficient numbers and at sufficient range, and Russia’s own defensive reflex does the rest.
That has already been happening for months. Moscow’s four major airports have repeatedly been forced to halt arrivals and departures simultaneously. Several cancellations were reported again on Wednesday. Ukraine has also struck energy infrastructure and logistics depots belonging to Russia’s two largest online retailers, Wildberries and Ozon, deep inside Russian territory, demonstrating that the drone campaign now reaches well beyond the border regions.
Aviation risk advisory firm Osprey Flight Solutions, in an alert to clients this week, assessed that while most Ukrainian drone and missile strikes are likely to occur within 300 kilometres of the border, daily attacks deeper inside Russia are “almost certain to continue” throughout the year. The firm added that “there is a realistic possibility that the frequency of Ukrainian strikes will continue to increase in the short term deep inside Russian territory,” and flagged a specific concern: “miscalculation and/or misidentification is likely in areas related to the Ukraine conflict.” That last phrase is the one that should concentrate minds in any airline boardroom still routing flights through Russian airspace.
Who Is Still Flying Over Russia, and Why
Most Western carriers stopped using Russian airspace after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The commercial logic for those that remain is straightforward. Chinese, Turkish, and Gulf state airlines save significant time and fuel on routes connecting Asia and Europe by flying the polar and trans-Siberian corridors over Russian territory. Rerouting adds hours and operating costs that compound across thousands of flights a year.
Zelensky’s warning was addressed specifically to carriers operating into major Russian cities, naming St Petersburg and Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Kyrgyzstan, dismissed the warning as evidence of state terrorism. “They are asking us to resume negotiations,” Putin told reporters, “but you don’t negotiate with terrorists.” He confirmed that Russian strikes on Ukraine would continue and said Russia’s military is preparing “massive” strikes on Ukrainian power stations. Heavy Russian attacks killed 12 people in Ukraine on Tuesday, with further strikes hitting Odesa, Sumy, and Kyiv on Wednesday. Kyiv and its surrounding region have now been attacked for seven consecutive days.
Putin did acknowledge that Ukrainian drone strikes had damaged infrastructure inside Russia, though he claimed only ten percent of oil refinery capacity remained in need of repair, a figure that itself implies substantial prior damage.
The MH17 Shadow and What It Demands of Regulators
For Malaysia, this story has a dimension that no other country in the region shares quite as acutely. In July 2014, just months after fighting erupted in eastern Ukraine between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over the conflict zone, killing all 298 people aboard. Last year, the International Civil Aviation Organisation ruled that Russia bore responsibility for the downing. Moscow has consistently denied any involvement.
In 2024, Putin issued an apology to Azerbaijan after a commercial airliner was shot down in Russian airspace, killing 38 people. He attributed that incident to Russian air defence systems that were actively repelling Ukrainian drones at the time. The sequence matters: a drone incursion triggers defensive fire, and a civilian aircraft in the wrong place at the wrong moment becomes collateral damage. Osprey’s warning about “misidentification” describes exactly that scenario.
Malaysia Airlines no longer flies over Russian or Ukrainian airspace, a policy adopted after MH17. The question now is whether carriers in other jurisdictions, particularly those in China, Turkey, and the Gulf, will reassess their routing decisions in light of Zelensky’s explicit and public warning. Insurers are also named in his statement, and insurance risk assessments tend to move faster than airline policy reviews when a head of state puts a threat on record.
Why the Escalation Curve Is the Real Story
Zelensky framed his warning carefully, saying Ukraine “does not threaten civilian aviation as such” and has no desire for innocent casualties. The point he is making is structural rather than intentional: a sky filled with drones at scale is a sky where the margin for error shrinks for everyone operating in it, including commercial aircraft that have no part in the conflict.
The trajectory of Ukraine’s drone campaign has been consistently upward in both range and frequency. Zelensky said weeks ago that Ukraine had “begun the process of bringing the war back to Russia,” and his weekend remarks reinforced that Russia must feel the war “returning to where it came from.” The airspace warning is an extension of that strategy, using economic and logistical pressure on Russia’s aviation sector as another front.
For the aviation industry broadly, and for the families of MH17 victims who spent a decade seeking accountability, the warning is a reminder that conflict zones and commercial air corridors are an inherently dangerous combination. The question of who bears responsibility when something goes wrong in a contested sky has already been answered once at enormous human cost. The pressure is now on airlines, insurers, and regulators to decide whether they are willing to test that question again.
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