Feb 21, 2022: According to a report by Reuters, Ukraine said 10 airlines had stopped flying there because of U.S warnings of an attack by Russian forces massed on its border, but insisted that its air corridors were still open and flying to the East European country was safe.

Germany’s Lufthansa joined KLM in cancelling flights to Ukraine from Monday.

Scandinavian airline SAS has also suspended weekly flights, while Air France has decided to cancel Tuesday flights between Paris and Kyiv as a “precautionary measure”.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Infrastructure Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov told a news breifing, “The current cancellation of flights by a number of foreign airlines is dictated solely by the information aggravation of the situation, and not by real changes in flight safety,”

“the state is working to replace cancelled flights”.

Kubrakov said that Ukraine International Airlines (UIA) has already started selling tickets and increased the capacity of additional flights from Kyiv to Munich and Geneva.

The airline has a total of 26 aircraft in its fleet but nine of them left the country last week for storage sites in Europe – seven of which were only on February 14, according to Flightradar24 tracking data. The exit came as two Ukrainian airlines revealed difficulties in obtaining insurance for some of their flights as Russia has a large military presence on its border.

Russia and Ukraine both hinted at fresh diplomatic efforts to avoid conflict on Monday, but Ukraine’s biggest airline said its insurers had already terminated cover for at least some of its aircraft on flights inside Ukrainian airspace.

One insurance firm denied airlines were pulling out due to a lack of cover, however.

UIA operates a mixture of Boeing 737 medium-haul passenger planes and a smaller fleet of Embraer regional jets. Three larger long-distance Boeing jets were mothballed during the coronavirus pandemic.

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