Is It Safe to Fly Over Russia? The Overflight Ban and What It Does to Your Route

Most of the attention on airspace closures in 2026 has gone to the Middle East, which is understandable — that is where the restrictions have been changing week to week. But the largest closed block of airspace on the planet is not there. It is Russia, and it has been effectively unavailable to a large part of the world's airlines since 2022.

The question people search is usually phrased as safety: is it safe to fly over Russia? The honest answer separates into two quite different questions, because the reason a European airline does not cross Russia has very little to do with the reason a passenger might worry about it. This piece takes both apart.

What is actually closed, and why

Russian airspace is closed to carriers from more than 35 countries and territories, including every EU member state, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Norway, Switzerland and Iceland. It is a reciprocal ban rather than a safety advisory: those countries closed their airspace to Russian aircraft in 2022, and Russia closed its own to theirs in response.

The scale is what makes it matter. The closed block covers roughly 17 million square kilometres — about twice the land area of the continental United States — and it sits directly across the shortest routes between Western Europe and North East Asia. There is no way to route around a country that size without adding a great deal of distance.

This is the distinction that gets lost. The Russian ban is a political and regulatory closure, not a conflict-zone advisory of the kind we describe in [EASA conflict-zone bulletins](/blog/easa-conflict-zone-bulletins-middle-east-explained). The airspace over most of Russia is not being avoided because regulators believe aircraft are at physical risk there.

So is it safe — for the airlines that still fly it?

A number of carriers cross Russia routinely and without incident: Chinese airlines, Indian carriers, Gulf and Turkish operators, and several others outside the banned group. They have been doing so continuously since 2022. On the evidence of operations rather than politics, the cruise-level transit of Russian airspace away from the Ukrainian border area has not produced the kind of incidents that drive genuine safety advisories.

The real risks that experienced operators weigh are second-order rather than kinetic, and they are worth understanding because they are the same risks that apply to any long overflight of a country you have no relationship with:

• Diversion options. A technical problem or a medical emergency over central Siberia means landing at an airfield where your airline has no ground handling, no spare parts, no staff, and, for a Western carrier, no diplomatic comfort. This is the reason most often cited privately by airline planners.
• Sanctions exposure. For a Western operator, an unscheduled landing raises immediate practical questions about fuel purchase, insurance validity and aircraft release. It is a commercial and legal risk more than a flight-safety one.
• Navigation interference. GPS jamming and spoofing has been widely reported around the Baltic and Black Sea regions rather than across Russia's interior. It is a real and growing issue that we cover separately in [GPS jamming and spoofing on flights](/blog/gps-jamming-spoofing-flights-2026).
• The Ukrainian border corridor, which is genuinely different. Airspace over Ukraine and the adjacent Russian regions is an active conflict area and is avoided by everyone, including the carriers that otherwise cross Russia freely.

What the detour costs you as a passenger

If you are flying a European, British or North American carrier between Europe and Asia, your aircraft is taking a longer way round. Depending on the specific city pair, the ban adds roughly two to five hours compared with the direct great-circle track over Siberia.

That has knock-on effects you may actually notice. Some routes have become technically marginal for certain aircraft types and now require a technical stop or a different aircraft. Others have shifted to schedules that suit the detour rather than the passenger. And the gap has changed which airlines are competitive on which routes — a carrier that can still overfly Russia holds a real time and fuel advantage on Europe-to-East-Asia and India-to-North-America flying.

For European airlines the cost is not only fuel. They also lost the overflight fees they used to pay Russia — around 420 million dollars a year in aggregate — but gained considerably more in fuel and crew costs, which is why several Europe-to-Asia routes were cut rather than flown longer.

The three corridors airlines use instead

Banned carriers have settled into three broad alternatives, and knowing which one your flight uses tells you a lot about what else it overflies.

• The Turkey–Central Asia corridor, the most common substitute for Europe–East Asia. It runs through Turkish airspace into Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan and then on across China or south towards South East Asia, adding roughly two to three hours.
• The southern routing via the Gulf and South Asia, which avoids Russia entirely but trades one set of geopolitical questions for another — and intersects the Middle East restrictions we track in [alternative flight routes avoiding Middle East airspace](/blog/alternative-flight-routes-avoiding-middle-east-airspace).
• The polar and North Pacific routings for North America–Asia flying, which stay well north and west of Russian airspace and are largely unaffected by the ban but are sensitive to Arctic diversion planning.

A reasonable way to think about it before you book

If your concern is physical safety, the Russian overflight ban is not the thing to optimise against. The carriers that cross Russia are operating in airspace that regulators have not flagged as dangerous at cruise level, and the carriers that do not cross it are not avoiding it for safety reasons.

If your concern is flight time, reliability and how much of the journey sits over airspace with limited diversion options, then it is worth knowing which way your flight goes — and that is genuinely checkable. A flight-tracking site will show you the filed track for the same flight number on previous days, which is a far better guide than the airline's own map.

Our guide to [reading a flight map for a healthy route](/blog/how-to-read-a-flight-map-healthy-route) covers how to do that check in a couple of minutes, and [how airlines plan flight routes around conflict zones](/blog/how-airlines-plan-flight-routes-around-conflict-zones) explains the decisions behind the line you see.

Will it reopen?

Nobody in the industry is planning around it reopening soon. The ban is reciprocal and tied to a broader sanctions framework rather than to any aviation-specific dispute, which means it is likely to move only as part of a much larger political shift — and then slowly, because insurance, overflight agreements and crew licensing all have to be rebuilt.

The practical planning assumption for 2026 and beyond is that the map has permanently two tiers: airlines that can fly the short way, and airlines that cannot. As a passenger, the only thing that really changes for you is the number of hours, and now you know why.