The Case for Reopening Ukraine’s Skies: Prospects and Obstacles for Bringing Civil Aviation Back

For this article, ZN.UA spoke on condition of anonymity with representatives of the State Aviation Service, UkSATSE and Ukrainian airports, as well as with military officers and Israeli industry experts.

 

We naively hope that civilian flights will come back to our lives the moment the security situation allows. That we will forget the day-long drives to airports in neighbouring countries, the surly border guards and the hours of waiting. That we will walk gladly back into Boryspil, so bound up with memories of meetings and partings at the gates, where the check-in desks belong to SkyUp and Windrose and the aircraft on the apron are Ukraine International Airlines, blue falcons in yellow circles on their tails.

It will not be like that. Ukrainian civil aviation is struggling through this long shutdown, and it may not come through at all unless the work starts now—war or no war.

Ukraine is one of the few dark patches on Flightradar. Apart from us, the only blackness is the Himalayas, and they are simply unflyable. Some fifty wars are being fought around the world at the moment, a record since the Second World War, so you find yourself wondering: why are the skies still open over countries in much the same trouble as we are? How do Israel's airports keep working, why did Yangon barely stop at all, and how has Iran already reopened part of its airspace to transit flights?

Not because we miss the sky, though we miss it badly. Not because reaching Chopin takes a day where Boryspil took an hour. And not because a country of tens of millions cannot run its logistics without aviation.

Because a standstill is death for an industry that was growing fast, creating jobs and value added, and standing as a mark of a civilized country. The longer Ukrainian civil aviation lies in its lethargy, the less of it is left.

We have already lost our national carrier: Antonov Airlines is a cargo operator that would have to build a passenger business from scratch. UIA is bankrupt and its aircraft will never fly again. Windrose has two aircraft abroad and that is what it works with; the same goes for SkyUp. Skyline is arguably in the best shape, having kept about ten aircraft in active service and operating charter routes in other countries. But even if it returns, it will not be reaching for the role of national carrier—that would take tens of billions of dollars.

We have lost most of our airports too. Before 24 February 2022, Ukraine had 14 working airports, six of which—Boryspil, Lviv, Odesa, Zhuliany, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia—handled 98 percent of traffic and generated around €2.5 billion in revenue (see figures 1–2). Of those, only Boryspil and Lviv are operating now. Kharkiv and Zhuliany are partly damaged; Odesa and Zaporizhzhia have suffered serious destruction. Lviv and Boryspil have taken strikes as well; the only difference is that these airfields are state-owned, have retained partial funding, can repair damage immediately and, on the whole, retain some of their staff and functionality. The rest, even if the skies reopen, will need years for repairs, finding specialists and, above all, securing investment.

Along with the infrastructure, we are rapidly losing qualified staff. Zhuliany, Kharkiv, Odesa, Zaporizhzhia and Lviv are short of between half and two thirds of their personnel. Boryspil has managed to keep almost all its employees, but even there people are leaving—and the longer the airport stands idle, the more of them go. Boryspil, for instance, arranged a partnership with the Kyiv Aviation Institute, offering students almost two hundred vacancies. There were meetings, there were pep talks for the young—and eight people were hired as a result. Reluctance to work in an industry that is effectively dead is understandable.

Figure 3 shows the pace at which passenger traffic at the country’s main airport recovered after the Covid lockdown: two years to reach two thirds of the pre-pandemic level—with enormous pent-up demand, infrastructure ready to go and no security risks whatsoever.

It is a miracle that after 52 months of standstill we still have two airports with working infrastructure and specialists we have managed to keep. But the miracle will not last forever. All the more so because the threat from Russia will go nowhere either when the hot phase of the war ends or when any document finalizing it is signed; therefore, any lowering of security standards will remain a deferred risk. So it would seem that it is not really so essential to wait for the war to end before starting to bring civilian flights back. Ideas along these lines have been expressed, tasks have been set, working groups have been created, Israeli experience has been studied. But… it never gets off the ground.

To find out why, we went through the blueprint for reopening the skies—a document built to work either way: starting now, with the war still on, or only once it "ends". The quotation marks are earned: an ending can take almost any form; the Korean War, for instance, has been running for 76 years.

Taking wing in stages

What is proposed is a very cautious, gradual move to limited operations. The first stage is technical flights to evacuate the aircraft that have been stuck in Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion. A test of the risk management system that would at the same time reduce insurance risks and allow owners to keep their aircraft in working order. The example of UIA, whose aircraft will never fly again for want of maintenance, shows how important that is.

Several such departures and even one arrival have already taken place. The pioneers were the Turkish military transport aircraft that brought humanitarian aid to Ukraine on the night of 24 February 2022 and were stranded here when the airspace closed. Their return to Türkiye took eight months to prepare.

Each subsequent preparation took less time, and the system is now ready for such flights to become quasi-regular. The risks are moderate—there are not many aircraft and they will carry no passengers—while coordination between everyone involved in the process is tested in practice.

Almost everyone we spoke to mentioned Lviv airport first as the launch pad for trial flights. The argument is purely geographical: it is closer to the western border. Yet if the experiment is scaled up, that same argument works in Boryspil’s favor: the distance from the Lviv airfield to the border is so short that it largely cancels out the time saving a flight is supposed to offer. Boryspil, after all, is easier to reach from every region except the western ones. On top of that, Boryspil is in better shape for protection, shelters, infrastructure, staff and backup power. And its baseline readiness to operate is higher.

Readiness varies from airport to airport, and it all hinges on investment. The sums involved (see table) are not huge, but they will not be found unless investors are confident that anyone will be flying here at all. Just how ready any of this is can be gauged from the State Aviation Service's reply to an official request from ZN.UA (see document): readiness checks are under way, but there is no final verdict yet. The figures in the table, in other words, have been calculated but not signed off.

Investment needed to restore airports’ operational readiness, UAH million

	Airfield	Terminal
Boryspil	Infrastructure ready for operations
Lviv
Zhuliany	258.2	99.5
Kharkiv	94.8	114.2
Odesa	75.0	100
Zaporizhzhia	89.2	107.4

Data as of March 2026, adjusted in line with the 2023 Report on the State of the Airport Sector.

The second stage is opening the airspace to medevac flights under the UN flag and with the other attributes of a humanitarian mission. The transition in question is possible only after the first stage has succeeded and coordination has been brought to perfection: here it is not only the crew that is at risk, but wounded passengers too.

The third stage is one-off charter flights and a gradual expansion of the route network. It sounds simple until you think about how an airport is protected by air defense systems. Surface-to-air missile systems protect an airport through all 360 degrees for as long as nothing is taking off from it; the moment an aircraft climbs, that sector is no longer protected, air defense work in it becomes dangerous, making both the aircraft and the airport itself vulnerable. The more such sectors there are, the weaker the basic protection. That is why doing this gradually is the key factor.

Industry specialists say that incidents are inevitable; what matters is learning to respond to them correctly, gradually increasing the load on the risk management system.

In practice, the response to threats would run like this: before departure, the joint command center, the operator and the airport assess the dangers, from military to meteorological. During take-off and landing, the riskiest phases, the crew stays in real-time contact with the center while the military are on alert. In flight, once cruising altitude has been reached, communication and risk assessment continue. If a threat does materialize, the civilian controller hands control to a military colleague, who steers the aircraft into a safe sector, and air defense then takes over. In cruise, such a manoeuvre is possible and relatively safe. Take-off and landing are another matter: those 15–20 minutes, risky enough in themselves, become the riskiest of all under an air threat.

Only once the third stage has gone smoothly can the final one begin: scheduled services. The service would be minimal—no more than two flights an hour, daytime only, and only in perfect weather. Even so, it would be a genuine step back towards normal life and an important signal to the aviation regulator, to insurers and carriers—and to the public. Above all, it would be a step towards reviving the industry: prove the risk-management system at one airport and it can be scaled to the rest.

True, we have nobody left to do the flying, but there will be takers, war risks and all. Ukraine is a tempting market: a population of at least 25 million, predictably steady demand for flights to and from the EU to see relatives over the holidays, enormous pent-up demand and not a single local carrier to compete with. A very tempting one, especially for airlines from countries that enjoy political immunity from Russian attack—China, Türkiye or the UAE. What is more, they are keen, and talks with such carriers are already under way—only it is not the government conducting them.

Minimum motivation, maximum risk

The government is bogged down drafting a Strategic Concept—of course it is. The document is still in progress, but we managed to see a working draft. Despite the name, it offers no strategic view. In fairness, it is unfinished and may yet be fleshed out; and its real value lies in gathering every conceivable threat in one place—threats that must be cleared before even the technical evacuation of an empty aircraft becomes possible.

The weakest link is coordination—under any scenario at all. The process demands close cooperation from a long list of parties: the military, the State Aviation Service, UkSATSE, the airport, the crew, the airline, the insurer, the lessor and, ultimately, the government, which has the final say. The more parties share responsibility, the less coordination there is—and their appetite for the job varies wildly.

The military will follow an order if one comes. But they see reopening the skies to civilian traffic as toothache on top of a migraine: the responsibility is immense, every failure will be theirs and every success someone else’s.

The State Aviation Service is funded from the budget, and how busy the airspace is makes no difference to that. UkSATSE (short for the Ukrainian State Air Traffic Services Enterprise) differs from it only in where the money comes from—donors—so the industry’s coma leaves it equally unmoved. The government remembers the idea whenever the president does. But let us be honest: the task is beyond the authors of the fuel-cashback scheme nicknamed “eBachok,” and beyond their successors too. The only ones with any real interest in getting even a handful of flights off the ground are the airports themselves, which cannot bear to watch the industry die.

So we are bringing minimum motivation to the job of heading off maximum risk. The list that follows is not exhaustive and is already enough for scepticism.

Information risks. This article will collect its share of comments about how dangerous it is to fly in wartime. At a session where Israeli specialists briefed Ukrainian officials, one of them made a fair point: travelling by rail under Shahed drones differs little from flying in the same conditions. A train usually carries far more people, moreover, and its ability to manoeuvre is nil. And yet Ukrainian Railways keep running.

Because the ground is close: for passengers, even the illusory chance of “getting out and sitting it out” in a treeline during a drone attack is worth everything. In the air, there is no such chance, and most people are afraid of flying in the best of conditions, let alone these. That fear will certainly be put to work in information and psychological operations, and the results will not be long in coming.

Cyberattacks. Air traffic management systems, navigation equipment, ticket booking—every one of them a target. Take down the link between controller and aircraft or the identification system, for a few hours, and flights are off, even if not a single Shahed goes near the airport. Hybrid warfare does not need a missile where a phishing email will do.

Energy risks. Not all airports have adequate backup power—far from it. A control tower without electricity means an instant halt to every movement, and what answers for that is neither the pilot nor the military but a generator nobody got round to buying or servicing. The enemy strikes the energy system methodically, and an airport is as much a point of vulnerability here as a substation or a boiler house. As things stand, exactly one airfield has enough backup power to see it through an emergency.

Insurance and leasing risks. Most insurers and lessors will steer clear of war risks. But somebody does fly over Israel, over the Middle East, over Iran, even over Somalia. Those insurers priced war risk in long ago and are ready for it. Lufthansa and Air France, admittedly, are unlikely to come to Ukraine. But we have already noted that carriers with "political immunity" from the Russians could take an interest in our market—from China, Türkiye, the UAE and perhaps even the United States. The relevant ministry, however, answered an official ZN.UA request about insurance in generalities: work with international brokers on recalculating cover to reflect war risks is under way. No terms, no names.

On liability the picture is clearer: legal responsibility for flight safety rests with the air carrier (Article 10 of the Air Code), and an incident would be investigated by an expert body that does not establish guilt—that is for the investigation and the courts. Even so, the first incident would scare off passengers, and any carrier willing to work here, for years. Which brings us to the main group of risks.

Military risks. The main threat is not the enemy and his cunning: responding to that is being drilled down to the last detail. Friendly fire is the open question. Firing on one's own through mistaken identification has attended every war. Modern technology cuts it to a minimum but guarantees nothing—least of all where mobile fire groups are operating with MANPADS. A large aircraft at cruising altitude cannot, admittedly, be hit by a portable weapon, but there are take-offs and landings. When Mykhailo Fedorov took over the Defense Ministry, he was staggered by the sheer number of mobile fire groups and by how little control there was over them. And what is to be done about garage-built jammers, which hobbyist innovators may test without telling the military command anything at all? The airports confirm that this happens, and that it has caused them no end of trouble.

Here coordination is, quite literally, priceless.

A coordinator for the process does exist. This summer a new body appeared—the Interagency Coordination Center for the Use of Airspace and the Operation of Civil Airports, bringing together nine agencies, from the Foreign Intelligence Service and the Defense Ministry’s Main Intelligence Directorate to the National Police and the National Guard. The wider the representation round the table, the less chance anything gets decided—though responsibility does get spread in the thinnest possible layer.

Asked point-blank by ZN.UA what quantitative indicators the government would accept as proof that risk had fallen far enough, the Development Ministry offered nothing concrete: the State Aviation Service, working with a group drawn from central executive bodies and from law enforcement and intelligence agencies, "continuously assesses" the level of threat.

One point matters above all: the decision to resume civilian flights is Ukraine’s alone.

When Ukraine could reopen its skies, according to ICAO

 

 

 

Although the whole of Ukraine’s airspace is officially classified as a high-risk conflict zone and closed to everyone except state aircraft, ICAO does not require the threat from Russia to disappear entirely—only that risk be reduced to an acceptable level, confirmed by measurable indicators. Unfortunately, we have not seen any such indicators in a single document, draft or official reply.

In theory, then, civil aviation could resume even without a formal end to the war—provided there is a sustained trend towards de-escalation, an effective system for identifying aircraft and a phased, controlled reopening of the airspace. True, de-escalation has been in short supply lately, as have air defenses, which directly affects the military’s willingness to open the skies to civilians.

That, however, is no reason not to prepare at all. Quite literally, the sooner we start, the more of Ukrainian civil aviation will be left.

There is plenty of work to do, from infrastructure and staff to talks with carriers, insurers and lessors. In parallel, it is entirely realistic to practise coordination on sporadic technical and evacuation flights under the phased plan described above. That would save a great deal of time on the return to normal operations and would sustain an industry that is on the brink, though it is capable of generating billions.

We have already lost our national carrier, our aircraft, a great many valuable specialists and a large part of our infrastructure. You will agree that the situation deserves more attention than listless quarterly meetings with no visible progress. The government must make every effort not to lose the whole thing for good.

Read this article in Ukrainian and russian.