Oleksandr Kovalenko: Russia May Go For Air Traffic Closure
15- 21.07.2025, 20:41
- 30,798
The expert named the condition.
Ukraine has been attacking Moscow and the Moscow region for four days in a row, leading to an aviation collapse at airports in the Russian capital.
What is the main purpose of these strikes? Charter97.org spoke to Ukrainian military and political observer for the Information Resistance group Alexander Kovalenko about this:
- Our goal is not to nightmare Russian passengers at the airports. But it has become an intermediate goal from the main tasks.
The main tasks are strikes on military enterprises, military industry, enterprises that take part in the provision of the Russian military-industrial complex and that are located on the territory of both Moscow and the Moscow region.
So, when Ukrainian long-range drones appear in the airspace, an air alert is sounded, the corresponding plans are introduced - "Carpets" and other some kind of floor rags. The flight of aviation is stopped. And this is logical, because the air defense system starts working, and knowing what kind of air defense system Russia has, no one would be surprised if they shot down their planes in non-stop mode.
Accordingly, as long as there is a drone raid on Russian enterprises and the Russian air defense system is working, as long as the threat of a drone raid persists, all airports stand still. As a result, all departures and landings are delayed, flights are redirected to other neighboring airports where there is no air alert, and so on.
This is a purely collateral effect, but it is no less important in the economic sense. These are hundreds of millions of losses for Russian airlines, which, among other things, replenish the Russian budget, which is used for the war against Ukraine. That is, by solving the problem with systemic strikes on Russian enterprises of the military-industrial complex and those involved in the provision of the military-industrial complex, we are also solving the issue of exerting economic pressure on Russia, which is losing hundreds of millions.
This, among other things, let us say, is pushing Russian airlines to bankruptcy. The bankruptcy of Russian airlines is also quite profitable for us.
This is another blow to the Russian economy. Therefore, we can say that this is a complex task.
- Can Russia go to the closure of air traffic?
- I think that it is not ripe for it yet. But if Ukrainian drone raids on the territory of the Russian Federation become relatively systematic, perhaps even 24/7, it will be forced to significantly limit flights in the European part of Russia. That's for sure.
- Many experts have called for strikes on the Russian capital so that Moscow residents will finally feel what war is like. Will such operations by the AFU affect the mood among Muscovites?
- We are not interested in sending an expensive attack drone to destroy some one-room khrushchevat of a local uncle Vasya the alkie somewhere in the Moscow suburbs. This is absolutely not cost-effective.
We send attack drones to targets that have a certain strategic, tactical importance: enterprises, oil refineries and scientific research institutes, and so on and so forth. The fact that the Russian air defense system ineptly shoots them down over Moscow and they fall on Muscovites' heads is a problem of the Russian air defense system alone. Therefore, no one is going to purposely target "civilians".
We are quite economical in this matter. We do not have enough means of defeat to squander them on absolutely unnecessary, absolutely irrational terror. Russia, for its part, is engaged in this, because, as we can see, it is doing much better, unfortunately.
They can afford to literally simulate the format of carpet bombing on Ukrainian cities. We, on the other hand, are aiming at military enterprises. All the incidental stuff is incidental.
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