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EU shuts down its airspace to Russian aircraft, incl oligarchs’ “private jets”

The European Union is shutting down the EU airspace for Russian-owned, Russian registered or Russian-controlled aircraft, Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced on Sunday evening, in a second package of measures against Russia.

Russian aircraft “won’t be able to land in, take off or overfly the territory of the EU, von der Leyen said adding the measure includes also “the oligarch’s private jets.”

So far the countries that have closed their air space to Russian flights or announced to do so:

European Union members Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, Italy, Slovenia, Finland, Malta, Poland, Romania, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, and Denmark.

Also the United Kingdom, Iceland, North Macedonia.

Russia has responded by closing its own airspace to flights operated by carriers from countries that announced bans, media report.

The Commission president added that they will ban the Kremlin’s media machine in the EU.  

She added that a third measure against Belarus and “the other aggressor in this war, Lukashenko’s regime”  will be punished with a new package of sanctions, hitting their most important sectors.

“All these measures come on top of the strong package presented yesterday, agreed by our international partners,” she added.

Greece has not decided to close its air space to Russian flights, so far (8 pm Feb 27), however, the Foreign Ministry advised Greeks earlier to postponed unnecessary travel to Russian Federation.

To the package of EU and US sanctions on Saturday night that include the tough measure of excluding some Russian banks from the global SWIFT* payments system, a senior government official told Reuters.

*SWIFT is a secure messaging system facilitating rapid cross-border payments and the main mechanism financing international trade.

Such a move, if taken, would mark a further escalation of concerted sanctions by the West against Russia and would make it harder for Russian companies to do business, Reuters noted.

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2 comments

  1. Next they have do is a ban in all EU ports for Russian-owned, Russian registered or Russian-controlled merchant ships.

  2. when turkey invaded cyprus, or the us/france invaded libya, or nato bombed then yugoslavia.. or the us invaded iraq or afghanistan.. i guess they were just as severe with sanctions , right?