The Federation Council criticized the idea of ​​the EC to abolish fees for flights over Siberia

Raising the issue of abolishing fees for foreign airlines for the use of airspace over Siberia is fundamentally wrong. About it declared Vice Speaker of the Federation Council Konstantin Kosachev in his Telegram channel.

“The very formulation of the question of the abolition of payment for the right to fly over the territory of Russia is fundamentally wrong. European officials should have better understood what the mechanism of the “trans-Siberian royalty” is, he wrote.

According to Kosachev, Russia charges for the use of ground-based aviation infrastructure. “This is not about paying for the right of passage, but about the so-called “pool agreements”, which are widely used in international practice as purely commercial contractual instruments,” the senator emphasized. He recalled that this practice also exists in Canada, Brazil and China.

Kosachev also stressed that now there are no conditions for negotiating the opening of airspace.

The day before, on January 16, Henrik Hololei, Head of the Directorate General for Transport of the European Commission (EC), at the Airline Economics conference in Dublin declaredthat Russia should stop charging foreign airlines for the use of the skies over Siberia once Russian airspace is once again available to Western companies.

Trans-Siberian payments are a fee that Russia has been using since the 1970s. charges foreign airlines for flights between Europe and Asia via Siberia. This route allows to reduce the range of intercontinental flight by 4000 km. The beneficiary of the payments is the national air carrier – “Aeroflot”, Part of the amount was then transferred to the Federal Air Transport Agency, for example, to support flight schools.

After the start of the NWO in Ukraine, the EU countries, the USA and Canada closed the airspace for Russian airlines. The UK banned Aeroflot and Russian private jets from flying. In response, Russia introduced restrictions on flights to aircraft from 36 countries without special permission from the Federal Air Transport Agency or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Thus, in 2022, trans-Siberian payments were mainly made by carriers from Southeast Asia that operated flights to Europe.