Major airports across Russia cancel hundreds of flights as passengers kept in the dark about Ukrainian drone threat

Nearly 2,000 flights were delayed and almost 500 canceled at airports across Russia over the weekend, the country’s Federal Aviation Agency (Rosaviatsia) reported on July 7.

The restrictions affected three major airports: Sheremetyevo in Moscow, Strigino in Nizhny Novgorod, and Pulkovo in St. Petersburg, with the latter being hit hardest. Concerns over a Ukrainian drone attack threat triggered a full shutdown of the airport, and stranded travelers were never told the real reason why the measures were introduced.

Russia's Defense Ministry claimed that it had intercepted 120 drones over Russian territory overnight between July 5 and July 6. Ukraine has not commented on reports of the attacks. Kyiv’s drone campaign, which has caused growing disruptions to civilian air travel across Russia, is part of a broader strategy aimed at targeting Russian logistics deep behind the front lines. Air traffic restrictions have been becoming more common in Russia in recent months after they were introduced in response to drone attacks in early and late May.

The Insider spoke with one eyewitness who spent an entire day at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport — and still could not fly out.

Katerina was in the terminal from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. She first had to swap her midday Aeroflot ticket to Samara for an evening flight after standing in line for almost four hours.

“I changed my Aeroflot ticket for the 12:40 flight and naïvely thought the 5:25 p.m. Pobeda would leave on time. I checked two suitcases, cleared security, and waited. An hour passed, then two. They delayed the flight: my boarding pass still said 6:15 p.m., but the clock read 6:25. Nearby sat passengers for the 9:50 a.m. St. Petersburg-Kaliningrad flight — still waiting.”

At no point, she said, were travelers told about “Plan Kover” (lit. “Plan Carpet”) the air-defense protocol that halts all takeoffs and landings when drone threats are suspected. Cellular service and Wi-Fi were spotty or absent.

“Only three kinds of announcements echoed through the terminal. The first one went: ‘Due to technical issues, the information on the display boards is not current. Please listen carefully to airport announcements.’

The second one went something like: ‘Attention passengers of Flight ___, your departure is delayed by ___ minutes/hours.’

And the third was: ‘Passengers of Flight ___, please proceed to Kroshka-Kartoshka or Teremok for a free meal.’

You walk up to the girls at the information desk and say, ‘Excuse me, I’m on flight such-and-such, and there’s no information on the board.’ One of them pulls out a thick folder filled with printed hotline numbers and starts flipping through it. I’ll say it again: not a single announcement that anything is wrong. I tell them, ‘I can’t call anyone — what else can I do?’ They say, ‘You can go back out and then head to the airline office on such-and-such floor.’

So I go back and first approach the check-in counter. I go up to the guy who checked me in — he doesn’t know anything and sends me to some airline representative. I find him and ask, ‘Dmitry, could you please tell me what’s going on with my flight?’ And he looks at me wide-eyed, and says, ‘Actually, Plan Kover’s been in effect for the past half hour.”

“If you had read the news you knew the skies might be closed, yet the departure board still showed flights leaving, some delayed, some seemingly on time. But inside the airport everything was chaos; no one understood a thing.”

At the height of the disruption, trainees manned the information desks — young staff who genuinely had no idea how to handle the situation, according to Katerina. With the airspace shut down, massive lines formed throughout the terminal. Passengers who had been waiting for hours were forced to sleep on the floor in the departure hall. Booking a hotel room was nearly impossible, she said.

“No one could explain anything to the Chinese passengers. No one spoke English. They told me they’d slept the previous night on a hotel lobby couch… In the departures zone, people were just lying down, sleeping wherever they could.”

Retrieving checked luggage wasn’t easy either. To get her suitcase back, Katerina said, it was necessary to queue multiple times: first at the airline’s office, and then at the lost and found.

“The conditions were just inhumane. There was a long line that at one point curled into a narrow corridor about 10 meters long and barely wide enough to stand in. There were families with children, elderly people. There was nothing to breathe — everyone was crammed in. The line ended at a metal door. Every seven minutes, someone inside would open it and call out, ‘Next!’ Inside, there were kind ladies, some shelving units, and, thankfully, air conditioning. But until then, you were basically standing in a sauna. Once inside, they took your passport and boarding pass, filled out a stinky little slip of paper, and gave you permission to return to the arrivals zone.”

“You leave, show the slip to the security guard, and he lets you through to the baggage belts.”

“I stood there for another two hours,” Katerina said. “I just stood there staring at the carousel. Every 15 minutes, an employee would tell me my luggage would arrive in another 15 minutes. I’d set a timer, it would go off. I’d ask again and get the same answer.

It felt like no one had any idea who was responsible for anything. We asked to speak with the shift supervisor. They told us he was busy and alone — no deputy, no support. I called the hotline and asked what to do if we hadn’t been able to retrieve our bags in two hours. They told me the only option was to go to the third floor and file a formal complaint with the prosecutor’s office.

I was so stunned, I started asking them, on record, if they were seriously saying that in Russia’s second-largest city, there was no one who could resolve a baggage issue except the prosecutor’s office. And they confirmed it — on record.”

Katerina described the transportation meltdown at Pulkovo as emblematic of modern Russia: “a disaster happens, and no one is responsible, no one knows what to do.”

“I’m standing there, looking at this crowd, and I can’t figure out, how are they even finding out what’s going on without any cell service? All you see are numbers: four airspace shutdowns, 100 to 150 canceled flights, and behind each flight are hundreds, maybe thousands of people,” she said. “There was a woman with a 7-year-old daughter. I think they had been saving up for a vacation in Turkey. They had Turkish [Airlines] tickets, and the little girl was crying the entire time they stood in line. I get it. Some people were traveling for business, others returning from vacation, some just trying to leave. People were missing connections, hotels, transfers — it was awful.

I’m sorry, but since [the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on] Feb. 24, 2022, situations like this aren’t exactly new. Why is closing the sky now ‘the collapse of the century’? Did this start only yesterday?”

Katerina finally left the airport around 10 p.m. and returned to St. Petersburg. Anyone hoping to reach Moscow by morning faced new hurdles, as some taxi drivers demanded 40,000 rubles ($450) for the 700-kilometer ride. Train tickets between the two cities were completely sold out. It was only on Monday, July 7, that Russian Railways announced that it would be adding extra trains. By then, the restrictions had been lifted.

The shutdowns could cost Russian airlines around 20 billion rubles ($254 million), the pro-Kremlin outlet Kommersant reported earlier today.

Ukraine has not publicly taken responsibility for the disruptions, though officials have acknowledged that Kyiv’s drone campaign is designed to erode Russia’s logistical networks and bring the consequences of the war closer to its population.

Serhii Bratchuk, spokesperson for the Ukrainian Defense Forces’ Southern Division, said in May that Ukraine was adjusting its drone tactics to intentionally disrupt Russian air operations and force the realities of the war into public view inside Russia, according to a report by The Kyiv Independent.

The economic fallout comes amid heightened scrutiny of Russia’s transportation sector. On July 7, Vladimir Putin dismissed Transport Minister Roman Starovoit. The move followed from the weekend of aviation chaos, along with a widely reported ammonia leak at the port of Ust-Luga. Starovoit then committed suicide.

The Kremlin has faced increasing difficulty shielding key infrastructure from Ukraine’s expanding long-range drone operations, which in recent months have targeted oil refineries, radar facilities, and now some of Russia’s busiest airports.

In early June, the Security Service of Ukraine carried out Operation Spiderweb — an audacious behind-the-lines attack that saw multiple military airfields across Russia targeted by drones launched remotely off the backs of unsuspecting cargo trucks. More than two dozen strategic long-range bombers were estimated to have been destroyed or critically damaged in the operation.