Ukrainian Drone Strikes Repeatedly Force Closures of Moscow's Airports

Flights at Moscow's Domodedovo, Sheremetyevo, Zhukovsky and Vnukovo airports have been suspended almost daily in October because of repeated Ukrainian drone attacks, according to the independent investigative outlet Agentstvo. On some days the airports were closed for up to nine hours.

In early September, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that Ukraine would seek to cut off the airspace around Moscow and other Russian destinations. He warned every airline using Russian airspace, every insurer and everyone using major Russian airports that the airspace would become completely unsafe. The following day Ukraine sent a corresponding warning to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

Rosaviatsiya, Russia's aviation authority, has an emergency "carpet" protocol designed to immediately close the airspace over a specific region or around affected airports if an aircraft violates Russian airspace, weapons are used, or unidentified objects appear in the sky. Once declared, drastic restrictions apply to all air traffic.

Oleksandr Laneckij, chief executive of the consultancy Friendly Avia Support, said essentially every drone poses a military threat. Military analyst Jan Matvejev said Ukraine has not yet fully shut down Russian airspace but remains committed to the idea, and that Russia's air defenses are not entirely effective against the drones.

The attacks are not confined to Moscow. In summer 2023, Ukrainian forces attacked the airport in Pskov, and earlier this month drone debris fell on Sochi airport. Russia has also struck Ukrainian airports; in September Zelenskyy said Kyiv's airport and Boryspil airport had been hit.

Laneckij warned that Russia might lower the threshold for declaring the carpet protocol. A lower threshold would mean more frequent and broader airspace closures, and he linked it to the risk of deadly incidents such as the Christmas Day 2024 crash of an Azerbaijan Airlines flight. Investigators say that aircraft was hit by a Russian air-defense missile used against drones, killing 38 people.

Matvejev said the risk to civil aircraft rises significantly when anti-aircraft missiles are used, compared with visually identifying and firing machine guns at low-flying drones.

For a multi-airport system like Moscow's, near-daily closures of up to nine hours change the operating reality more than any single strike does. Schedules, crew duty limits and aircraft rotations are built around airports being open, and when four airports can be shut at once, diversion options inside the same region narrow sharply. The cost lands first on whoever holds the aircraft and the slots, and it compounds with every repeat.

Laneckij put the question of whether international airlines suspend Russia flights down to three factors: the military threat, the level of demand and insurance costs. Higher insurance rates for flights to Russia could sharply raise ticket prices. He also noted that competition in Russia's aviation market has already declined because many airlines are no longer in business, which has increased demand for tickets on the remaining foreign airlines. Demand, in other words, currently cushions the threat, and insurers are the party whose pricing would move first.

The next signals sit with specific actors: whether Rosaviatsiya changes when it declares the carpet protocol, how ICAO responds to Ukraine's warning, and whether insurers reprice Russia-bound flights.