A growing number of European countries announced on Sunday that they were closing their airspace to Russian planes in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy and the Netherlands joined at least a dozen European countries that had made similar announcements.
“There is no room in Dutch airspace for a regime that applies unnecessary and brutal violence,” the infrastructure minister for the Netherlands, Mark Harbers, said on Twitter.
Denmark’s minister of foreign affairs, Jeppe Kofod, said he would push for Russian aircraft to be banned from the entirety of the European Union’s airspace at a meeting of the bloc’s ministers of foreign affairs on Sunday.
Britain has banned all flights by Russia’s flagship carrier, Aeroflot, from its airspace, and the German airline Lufthansa said on Saturday that it would not use Russian airspace for the next week.
Germany banned Russian aircraft, with the exception of humanitarian flights, from its airspace starting Sunday for the next three months.
In response to the measures, the Russian government has banned flights from several European countries, and S7, Russia’s second-largest airline, suspended its flights to Europe.
