Zelenskyy held a press conference to tell airlines they should probably avoid Russian airspace. Because apparently aviation authorities worldwide were waiting for geopolitical guidance from a wartime president before updating their flight paths. Delta was about to route through Volgograd until this announcement saved them.
Ukrainian drone operations are expanding. Russian airspace is now unsafe. These two facts are related in the way a arsonist's presence correlates with fires. The technical analysis here is straightforward: planes and military drones occupy the same vertical space, and physics has not issued an exception for commercial aviation.
Airlines responded by continuing to do exactly what they were already doing, which is not flying over active war zones. Lufthansa released a statement confirming they will maintain their current routes, which have avoided Russian airspace since February 2022. Ryanair considered it briefly for the cost savings but decided even they have limits.
The skies are increasingly unsafe, Zelenskyy warned. He did not specify unsafe compared to what baseline, since Russian airspace has been a no-fly zone for Western carriers for four years now. But retail traders heard "drone expansion" and immediately started researching defense contractor ETFs, missing the part where this entire story affects precisely zero publicly traded companies they have access to.
The real victims here are the airport lounges in Moscow, which have seen decreased international traffic and now face the additional indignity of domestic flights being the only revenue stream. Imagine surviving Soviet collapse only to become a regional hub for Aeroflot connections.
Zelenskyy's advice boils down to: don't fly where explosions happen. Groundbreaking stuff. The FAA will probably issue a revised guidance memo that says the same thing in forty pages of regulatory language, and some day trader in Ohio will try to short Boeing over it.
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