Flight Approval Dispute Briefly Halts German-Russian Air Traffic

June 3, 2021

Air traffic between Germany and Russia was briefly disrupted on Wednesday due to a dispute over flight approvals that left passengers stranded.

The two sides started locking horns on Wednesday morning, when two Lufthansa flights departing from Frankfurt had to be scrapped because Russian authorities had failed to issue the necessary permits.

In response, the German Federal Aviation Office said it would not issue any further permits for incoming flights by Russian airlines until the Russian authorities had approved flights from Germany.

Consequently, flights by Russian airlines Aeroflot and S7 could not take place on Wednesday.

The quarrel appeared to be resolved by Wednesday evening, when German carrier Lufthansa said it had received permission to land in Moscow and St Petersburg for the entire month of June.

The Transport Ministry in Berlin confirmed that permission had been granted to Lufthansa and so Russian airlines were once again allowed to land in Germany.

According to ministry sources, the row has its origins in March 2020.

At that time, Russia unilaterally suspended bilateral flight agreements due to the coronavirus pandemic.

As a result, the overall number of flights were reduced and the journeys had to be approved on a monthly basis.

But other tensions over flights erupted in the wake of last month's forced diversion to Belarus of a Ryanair plane, which was travelling from Greece to Lithuania.

Once at the airport in Minsk, Belarusian activist journalist Roman Protasevich was taken into custody along with his girlfriend.

The incident was described as a "state hijacking" by Greece and led to widespread outrage at Belarus' long-time authoritarian ruler Alexander Lukaschenko, who is backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The European Union urged airlines based in the bloc to avoid Belarus airspace. That led air carriers to draw up revised flight paths to Russia, but in some cases Russia denied the new applications, including for Air France and Austrian Airlines.

The Russian aviation authority said that it could not keep pace with the large number of such applications that needed to be processed, leading to the cancellations.

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