The EU Aviation Safety Committee has included 21 Russian airlines on  the list of carriers that are banned or restricted from flying within the EU because these carriers do not meet international safety standards. The European Commission has announced this.

Among the Russian airlines that made the list are Aeroflot, Rossiya, Pobeda, S7, Utair, Nordwind, Aurora, Izhavia.

Carriers from the Russian Federation were included in the list in connection with a law adopted in March , which allowed Russian airlines to register the rights to foreign aircraft under lease and issue domestic airworthiness certificates to such aircraft.

European Commissioner for Transport Adina Valyan said that the blacklisting of Russian airlines is not a sanction against Russia, but is dictated by security considerations.

The Federal Air Transport Agency has allowed Russian airlines to operate hundreds of foreign aircraft without a valid airworthiness certificate. <…> This not only clearly violates the Convention on International Civil Aviation, but also creates a direct threat to flight safety. We live in conditions of unprovoked Russian military aggression against Ukraine. But I want to be clear that this decision is not yet another sanction against Russia; it was adopted solely on the basis of technical and safety considerations. We don’t mix security with politics.

The Russian authorities allowed the issuance of domestic airworthiness certificates to leased aircraft after such aircraft began to be detained abroad. This was due to the sanctions that the EU imposed due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These sanctions obligated lessors to terminate contracts with Russian airlines and obtain the return of leased aircraft.

The Russian authorities did not voluntarily return these planes. Because of this, according  to the Ministry of Transport at the end of March, 78 out of more than 1,300 aircraft of Russian airlines were arrested abroad.

The head of the Ministry of Transport, Vitaly Savelyev , said that for Russia to give up leased aircraft “means leaving itself without aviation.” At the same time, he  warned that these planes will never again be able to fly to countries that are implementing sanctions, “due to the fact that we took someone else’s property.” Almost 200 aircraft are available for international flights that are Russian or were registered as Russian before the imposition of sanctions.

(c)MEDUZA 2022