Late last week, Ukraine International Airlines (UIA) announced that it would be continuing with its suspension of flights to Poland. The airline had announced late last month that it would be resuming its Kyiv-Warsaw-Kyiv service on June 18th but is now 'reviewing' these plans due to weak demand and the need to overfly Belarusian airspace.

Kyiv to Warsaw flights canceled

In just over 10 days, UIA was hoping to restart its flights to Warsaw which were originally canceled due to the impact of COVID-19. This would have seen a Kyiv-Warsaw-Kyiv service on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. Unfortunately, that plan is now on hold.

"The reason for this decision was the situation that arose due to the need to fly over the territory of Belarus..." the airline says in a public statement on its website. It adds that "the subsequent redistribution of passenger traffic observed by the UIA in this direction" was another reason for the service suspension.

UIA says that it will "carefully analyze the market" for both point-to-point passengers traveling to/from Poland, as well as transfer passengers traveling with a change in Poland or Ukraine. "If the demand for the UIA network is restored, the flights will be resumed," it notes.

Is Belarus a scapegoat?

Citing "the need to fly over the territory of Belarus" is a very interesting reason for UIA to cancel its Kyiv-Warsaw service. If we plug in the two airports, KBP and WAW, into a tool like GCMap.com, we can see that even the most direct flight between the two airports overflies the tiniest portion of Belarusian airspace.

It gets even more suspicious when examining historical flight data. If we take a look at flights PS803 and the returning PS804, we can see that UIA's aircraft doesn't overfly Belarus at all. Instead, it flies at a trajectory that sees it remain completely in Polish or Ukrainian airspace.

Thus, one has to wonder why the airline is mentioning Belarus at all when it comes to this service cancelation. With Ukraine having its own tensions with Belarus, blaming its flight suspension on the Ryanair incident could be slightly political, but it's difficult to speculate on this issue.

We can, however, look to UIA's other reason for suspending the flight- what it calls "the subsequent redistribution of passenger traffic." The airline's weak demand on this route (which may or may not be influenced by recent events involving Belarus)  is likely the bigger reason that it has decided to hold off on resuming the service.

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Ground-based alternatives

With Ukraine and Poland sharing a border, the cities aren't completely disconnected due to the continuation of a flight suspension. Although they aren't too close to one another (448 miles by air), the 80-minute flight can be replaced by a train or bus journey. Unfortunately, this will take at least 14 hours, if not longer.

Simple Flying reached out to UIA for clarification on the service cancelation, given the fact that there is no need to fly over Belarusian airspace. At the time of publication, no response was received.

What do you make of this situation and the airline's reasoning? Let us know in the comments.