War and sanctions have cut Russia’s nonstop flight network to about 30 countries this summer — fewer than during the Iron Curtain era

Russians will have nonstop service to 31–32 countries this summer — 25% fewer than airlines offered in their winter schedules and a third of what the Soviet Union provided during the Iron Curtain era, the Association of Tour Operators of Russia (ATOR) said.

The exact number will depend on whether flights to Saudi Arabia are restored.

Not all of those destinations are useful for organized tourism, ATOR noted. Israel, Iran, Qatar, the UAE, Oman, and Saudi Arabia have been off-limits for package tours since March 2026, and travel to Afghanistan and Iran was not popular even before that. For mass tourism purposes, at most about 15 countries will be reachable from Russia on direct flights in June, the report said.

In the winter of 2025–2026, Russia’s direct-flight network covered 43 countries, according to ATOR’s analytics service. By June, seasonal, fuel-related, and geopolitical factors had significantly trimmed that number.

Several routes are missing from the summer 2026 schedule: Cuba and Venezuela, because of fuel and geopolitical crises; Kuwait and Bahrain, because of the war in the Middle East; Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Malaysia from Siberia, where those routes are seasonal; Algeria, which has had no direct flights since April with no word on resumption; and the Seychelles, which Aeroflot stopped serving on May 13 — a seasonal suspension that happens every year, with flights expected to return in the fall.

ATOR noted that Aeroflot operated flights to 80–100 foreign destinations in the 1980s; the figure is qualified by the fact that some routes counted as domestic under the Soviet Union and became international only after its dissolution.

There have been no direct flights from Russia to Europe since 2022, when EU countries closed their airspace to Russian aircraft following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.