By Yuliia Dysa<\/p>\n
KYIV, Sept 2 (Reuters) – Ukraine has urged the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to ask its members to fully ban \u200coperations in Russian airspace, a day after President Volodymyr Zelenskiy \u200cwarned it was “becoming completely unsafe”.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, top Ukrainian officials said the country would step \u200bup retaliation against Russia’s intensified strikes on Kyiv, which has been under continuous air raid alerts for seven days and has suffered hits on civilian infrastructure.<\/p>\n
Ukraine would only target Russian military facilities and not threaten civilian aircraft, \u200cZelenskiy added, but stressed \u2060that the growing number of Ukrainian drones in Russian skies should “be taken into account”.<\/p>\n
In the letter to ICAO chairman \u2060Juan Carlos Salazar, a copy of which was exclusively shared with Reuters, Ukraine’s infrastructure minister Mykola Kalashnyk said Kyiv believed the risk of tragedies in \u200bthe skies \u200bshould be minimised.<\/p>\n
Ukraine asked ICAO to \u200bencourage aviation authorities and airlines \u200cto safeguard civil aviation, “including by facilitating the full prohibition by ICAO member states of civil aircraft operations within the airspace of the Russian Federation”.<\/p>\n
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Zelenskiy’s comments amounted to “state terrorism”. Moscow on Wednesday vowed to head off any disruption to civil aviation.<\/p>\n
In 2024, 38 \u200cpeople were killed when an Azerbaijan Airlines \u200bplane heading to Russia’s Grozny crash-landed in \u200bKazakhstan after diverting from its \u200bcourse. Putin later said two Russian missiles detonated near \u200cthe aircraft after Ukrainian drones entered \u200bthe airspace.<\/p>\n
Ukraine closed \u200bits airspace to civilian traffic when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, unleashing missile barrages without issuing warnings to civilian \u200baircraft in Ukrainian airspace.<\/p>\n
Airports \u200chave remained closed ever since, and SkyUp, Ukraine’s only surviving \u200bairline, now operates from neighbouring Moldova.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Yuliia Dysa, Editing \u200bby Alex Richardson and Ros Russell)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Yuliia Dysa KYIV, Sept 2 (Reuters) – Ukraine has urged the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36362,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[12622,414,3773,12005,509,12566,26,37,12647,412,12648,12646],"class_list":["post-36361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-icao","tag-putin","tag-reuters","tag-russias","tag-russian","tag-sept-2","tag-ukraine","tag-ukrainian","tag-unsafe","tag-volodymyr-zelenskiy","tag-yuliia-dysa","tag-yuliia-dysa-kyiv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36361\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}