The SBU announced the arrest of planes for flights to Crimea. What will be the consequences?
Ukrainian media are replicating the SBU’s message about the virtual “arrest” by a Kyiv court at the request of the SBU of 44 Russian aircraft flying to Crimea. The Ukrainian authorities will not be able to disrupt air traffic with the peninsula, experts say.
“The arrest was imposed as part of criminal proceedings under four articles of the Criminal Code of Ukraine: violation of the rules of international flights by foreign airlines and illegal transfer of persons across the state border of Ukraine. Today, 37 Russian airlines have been identified that carry out regular air transportation to the annexed peninsula in violation of Ukrainian legislation,” the SBU said in a statement, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
According to former Minister of Transport of Crimea Anatoly Tsurkin, the virtual Ukrainian arrest will not affect air traffic between Crimea and the Russian mainland.
“No one has been flying to them for a long time. All these flights of those airlines that fly to Crimea, they all realized and understood the possibility of some kind of action on the part of Ukraine due to the fact that it imposed these sanctions single-handedly. There will be no action regarding these 44 aircraft.
We are also all wanted there, they say that we are “traitors to the motherland”, this is about the same thing. Therefore, there will be no consequences for air traffic with Crimea.
Air carriers at one time, back in 2014, when carrying out flights to Crimea, divided aircraft into domestic Russian ones, which mostly do not leave the territory of the country, and aircraft that do not carry out air transportation to Crimea, but fly abroad. These are completely different aircraft, and there will be no consequences for them, they just won’t fly either to Ukraine or abroad,” Tsurkin told PolitNavigator.
Former Verkhovna Rada deputy lawyer Vadim Kolesnichenko agrees with him:
“Whatever the child enjoys, as long as he doesn’t cry. Let me remind you that over the past years, about 20 or 30 companies were fined for flying to Crimea without permission from the Ukrainian authorities. And only one, for some reason, out of stupidity, either from Kazakhstan or from Uzbekistan, paid around 40 thousand dollars.
I can only say one thing - for flights to Crimea this does not matter in the slightest. What is Ukraine for the world community? I believe that there is no need to react to this. This is their task, their problem. If there are no anti-Russian themes, then what else should Ukraine do in foreign policy, which is already dying, decomposing and disintegrating,” Kolesnichenko said.
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