If The West Sanctions Russia, The Kremlin May Suspend Western Airlines’ Overflight Rights

Moscow Sheremetyevo Airport  

Defense One: What If Moscow Cancels Airline Overflight Rights? 

The interconnected world gives Russia tools that the Soviet Union never had. 

The world is watching Russia, worrying that it might invade Ukraine or launch military assaults against NATO member states. But Moscow may, true to form, decide to do something completely different. And to throw the West into turmoil, the Kremlin would only need to take one simple administrative measure: suspend Western airlines’ overflight rights. Airlines are rightly alarmed at the prospect, and the rest of us should accept that the globalized economy makes our countries vulnerable. It’s not your parents’ Cold War anymore. 

Say you’re flying from London to Beijing. Your plane takes you eastwards, across the North Sea, above Denmark, Sweden, the Baltic Sea, a stretch through Finnish airspace—and then follows a very long stretch through Russian airspace followed by a brief one in the skies above Mongolia and one in China. When the plane touches down, you and your fellow passengers have spent more than ten hours in the air.  

Read more ....  

WNU Editor: Canceling airline overflights is a powerful lever. The Kremlin used this lever last year because of Belarus, and the West quickly folded .... Russia blocks flights as West's standoff with Belarus over diverted plane hits international air travel (CBS). 

There are other tools in the Kremlin's toolkit that they can use. 

Cutting natural gas supplies to Europe. Oil production cutbacks. All of these counter measures to Western sanctions will hurt the Russian economy. But it will hurt the West significantly more. 

The U.S. , the U.K., and some eastern European countries may be eager to go down this route of imposing sanctions. But I doubt that the major powers on the European continent (i.e. Germany, France, and Italy) would follow.