Kyiv—Ukraine on Sunday vowed to keep its airspace open to international travel despite Western warnings that Russian troops conducting drills near its borders could invade at any point.
The Dutch carrier KLM on Saturday became the first major airline to indefinitely suspend flights to the former Soviet republic because of the rising risks.
In Washington, efforts to defuse the crisis in Ukraine via a frenzy of telephone diplomacy failed to ease tensions Saturday, with US President Joe Biden warning that Russia faces “swift and severe costs” if its troops carry out an invasion.
This developed as the Philippine Embassy in Warsaw, Poland remained in touch with the Filipino community in Ukraine, in coordination with the Honorary Consulate General in Kyiv, amid heightened tensions and the United States warning about a possible Russian invasion.
In Manila, Senator Panfilo Lacson, who heads the Senate Committee on Defense and Security, called on the national government to be proactive in approaching this issue and take all the necessary measures to protect Filipinos there like what other nations have already been doing.
Stressing that “nobody wins in a war,” Lacson—the presidential candidate of Partido Reporma in the May 9 elections —aired deep concerns over the latest developments in Ukraine.
“We might think that Ukraine is far away, and that there is no danger for the Philippines, but we are all living in a global village. What is happening in Ukraine may create instability and other potential flashpoints in the world including that of our region,” he said in a statement.
Gonar Musor, Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public and Cultural Diplomacy, said approximately 380 Filipino nationals are living in Ukraine.
“Most are in Kyiv and its environs and are therefore located far from the eastern border near Russia,” he said in a statement.
Western leaders have been shuttling back and forth to Moscow in the hopes of persuading Putin to stand his troops down.
Ukraine’s budget airline SkyUp said on Sunday that its flight from Portugal to Kyiv was forced to land in Moldova because the plane’s Irish leasing company had revoked permission for it to cross into Ukraine.
“The airspace over Ukraine remains open and the state is working on preempting risks for airlines,” the infrastructure ministry said after convening an emergency meeting focused on the threat of Ukraine being cut off from international flights.
Industry analysts believe other international airlines may soon also ban flights into Ukraine because of the growing cost to travel insurers.
The travel industry is still haunted by the memory of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 being shot down while flying near eastern Ukraine’s conflict zone in July 2014. All 298 passengers aboard the Amsterdam-Kuala Lumpur flight died.
Ukraine’s infrastructure ministry acknowledged that “some carriers are facing difficulties linked to fluctuations on the insurance market”.
“For its part, the state is prepared to support airlines and provide them with additional financial guarantees in order to support the market,” it said.
In London, British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace has compared Western diplomatic efforts to head off a Russian invasion of Ukraine to the appeasement of Nazi Germany ahead of World War II.
Wallace told the Sunday Times that Russian President Vladimir Putin could send his massed troops into Ukraine “at any time” and suggested unnamed Western countries were not being tough enough with Moscow.
“It may be that he (Putin) just switches off his tanks and we all go home but there is a whiff of Munich in the air from some in the West,” Wallace said.
The 1938 Munich Agreement handed Nazi Germany parts of Czechoslovakia in a failed bid to head off major conflict in Europe.
“The worrying thing is that despite the massive amount of increased diplomacy, that military build-up has continued. It has not paused, it
has continued,” Wallace said.
But Moscow “doesn’t give a shit” about the risk of Western sanctions if it were to invade Ukraine, Russia’s outspoken ambassador to Sweden
told a Swedish newspaper.
“Excuse my language, but we don’t give a shit about all their sanctions”, Viktor Tatarintsev told the Aftonbladet newspaper in an interview posted on its website late Saturday.
“We have already had so many sanctions and in that sense, they’ve had a positive effect on our economy and agriculture,” said the veteran diplomat, who speaks fluent Swedish and has been posted to the Scandinavian country four times.
“We are more self-sufficient and have been able to increase our exports. We have no Italian or Swiss cheeses, but we’ve learned to make just as good Russian cheeses using Italian and Swiss recipes”, he said.
“New sanctions are nothing positive but not as bad as the West makes it sound,” he added.
Ukraine’s ambassador to London warned that mentioning Munich was not necessarily helping the situation.
“It’s not the best time for us to offend our partners in the world, reminding them of this act which actually (had) not brought peace but the opposite, it brought war,” Vadym Prystaiko told BBC radio.
“There’s panic everywhere not just in people’s minds but in financial markets as well,” he added.
Asked about the Munich comparison on Sunday morning television, fellow British Conservative MP Brandon Lewis said the association with the Nazis was “not the point.”
Wallace was making “the comparison between the diplomatic attempts in the run-up to World War Two and the diplomatic attempts we’re all
putting in now,” Lewis said on Sky News.
Defense minister Wallace tweeted later Sunday that he was cutting short a family holiday and returning home “because we are concerned about the worsening situation in Ukraine.”
Musor said Filipinos are “encouraged to contact the embassy, report any untoward incident they might observe in their respective areas,
and continue monitoring their Filipino friends through social media.”
A deployment ban was imposed by Manila since 2014 when political crisis hit the Eastern European nation and Russia annexed Crimea.
In Stockholm, Tatarintsev accused the West of not understanding the
Russian mentality.
“The more the West pushes Russia, the stronger the Russian response will be,” he said.
The diplomat’s comments come as Western nations fear Moscow is preparing an invasion of Ukraine, having nearly surrounded its western
neighbor with more than 100,000 troops.
Washington has warned that an all-out invasion could begin “any day”.
Tatarintsev insisted Moscow was trying to avoid a war.
“That is our political leadership’s most sincere wish. The last thing people in Russia want is war.”