EU closes skies of Europe to Russian aircraft. Turkey to close Bosporus to Russian ships.

Tanker passing through Bosporus Straits

All 27 member states of the European Union will close their airspace not only to Russian commercial aircraft, but to private planes and chartered aircraft, including business jets, from Russia. The EU also announced that it will authorize the shipment of combat weapons to Ukraine. “For the first time ever, the European Union will finance the purchase and delivery of weapons and other equipment to a country that is under attack,” said Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, after a meeting today of EU foreign ministers in Brussels, Belgium.

The EU took steps to ban RT, a Russian government-funded global broadcasting network, and Sputnik, a Russian “news” agency from European airwaves.

The EU also announced that it will start to authorize sanctions against Belarus, which has allowed Russia to launch attacks on Ukraine from its soil. Some countries have already banned flights to and from Belarus.

The actions announced by the EU today have to be approved by individual member states because the EU is not a federation of states but a kind of membership club which leaves final authority for its actions up to the member states.

Meanwhile Turkey, which is a member of NATO but not of the EU, announced that the invasion of Ukraine by Russia constitutes a “war,” which under a 1936 treaty allows Turkey to bar ships from Russia and Ukraine from passing through the Bosporus Straits connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.

The EU seems now to be completely unified in its opposition to Russia and determined to isolate Putin’s outlaw state from Europe.

The United States has not closed its airspace to Russian aircraft. The Department of State has not ordered its diplomats out of Russia, and I’m sure calculations are being made that many U.S. diplomats, military personnel, and civilians would be trapped in Russia if we banned Russian airlines from flying to the U.S., which would doubtlessly lead to an immediate Russian ban on flights by American airlines. Russia has already banned Delta from flying to Russia because of its cancelling of code-sharing with Aeroflot. Delta currently does not fly to Russia anyway.

Diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Russia are already “strained,” as the saying goes. The U.S. and Russia have ordered the number two diplomats in their corresponding embassies to leave the country.

The U.S. has not responded to Russia’s move to put its nuclear forces on alert with a similar order to U.S. forces. If we’re closer to the “brink of nuclear war,” it is so far from only one direction. But It’s Never A Good Sign when nuclear weapons are even mentioned much less put on alert by one of the world’s two largest nuclear powers.

Putin is probably right now looking for a way to get out of the box he’s built around himself with a minimum amount of humiliation. I hope the U.S. and Ukraine are both looking for a way to help him. Russia is already weakened by Putin’s insane war against Ukraine. We should consider that’s enough without drumming home the idea that he is at the helm of what we used to call a “pitiful helpless giant.”