Sanctions and sun
We should make it harder for Russians to go on holiday
Most people love to get away for a holiday in the sun. Russians certainly do. I don’t blame them.
The temperature in Moscow this week is around zero, with sleet and 40 miles an hour winds. St Petersburg will see snow as well as sleet, and Yekaterinburg is colder than both. In contrast Egypt’s Sharm El Sheikh resort will have day time temperatures of 27 degrees, dropping to 17 overnight. Why wouldn’t a Russian want to spend a week in Egypt at this time of year?
Russians are currently able to fly to Sharm El Sheik from 7 different cities across Russia. Flights are offered by a range of airlines, both Russian and Egyptian, full service, low cost and chartered. Similarly, it is possible to fly from Russia to Dubai, Turkey and so on, again with a choice of Russian or international airlines. But whether you fly with a Russian or international airline, whether full service, low cost or chartered, one thing is for sure - your plane will have been manufactured in the USA or in Western Europe. Every single flight that I could find on all these international routes from Russia used a Boeing or Airbus plane.
When Russia decided to invade Ukraine, the west sanctioned all Russian airlines. Anyone who services a Russian owned plane is guilty of sanctions busting. Even refuelling a Russian owned plane breaks the sanctions rules. And yet those planes are getting refuelled, and they are getting serviced. The sanctions are not working.
Furthermore, the sanctions have an obvious gap - companies like Emirates can and do continue to fly into and out of Russia. Emirates will not only take Russians for a week in the Dubai sun, they will also sell me a ticket from London to Moscow, connecting in Dubai.
I make two policy suggestions. First, that Western governments announce that unless a Russian owned plane is sold in the next year, it will never be allowed to fly to any Western country, in perpetuity, no matter what happens in Ukraine in future, and no matter who owns the plane in future. Furthermore, there will be a lifetime ban on Boeing and Airbus supplying parts, and servicing that plane in future, again irrespective of future ownership. Finally, parts from such planes would be banned from being used in planes used in the West, again, in perpetuity.
The aim is to force Russian airlines to make a choice. They can keep their planes, but if they do, the value of those planes will be much lower than is currently the case those planes cannot be serviced and will not therefore last as long. While it is not currently possible for them to sell their planes, their owners can expect that sooner or later it will be possible to sell them internationally. That expectation creates a value I wish to destroy. The alternative is to sell their planes - which I would permit for a year. I realise that Russia will receive money for their planes, but so be it - I genuinely want to make Russians life less pleasurable as a result of Putin’s decisions. Making international travel harder seems like a good way to do that.
The second suggestion is that Boeing and Airbus, and their agents, should be banned from servicing any plane of any company that flies to Russia. This means that unless Emirates stops flying to Russia, not one of their 249 planes will be serviced. At that point they would lose the right to fly to pretty much every other destination, since Western countries usually require evidence of correct servicing for a plane to be flown into their airspace. They will literally have no choice but to comply.
This proposal will work because Emirates - and Air China for that matter - have to use Western planes. We make those planes, and we should be more willing to use the power that that gives us. Sanctions should be designed to make life hard for the other side, not just to look good on paper.