For much of the modern aviation era, geography was something the global aviation industry learned to overcome. Simply put, unlike a railway, a pipeline, or a highway, an aircraft does not require a continuous physical infrastructure between its point of departure and its destination. Routes could change, aircraft could move between markets, and hubs could rise and decline. If economics justified a service, aviation possessed an extraordinary ability to find another way through. Before 2022, for nearly a decade at Russian AirBridgeCargo Airlines, I watched that principle operate from inside one of the most geographically ambitious cargo networks in the world, connecting different parts of Eurasia and North America.
Modern aviation has survived larger shocks than the current restrictions across Russian and Gulf airspace. 9/11 transformed aviation security, while the novel coronavirus closed borders, grounded fleets, and collapsed global passenger demand. Yet the pandemic was, in one important sense, symmetric and reversible. Once restrictions were lifted, much of the network could return. By 2024, worldwide passenger demand was already 3.8 percent above its 2019 level.
The disruptions accumulating in Eurasia since 2022 are different, though, because they are asymmetric, persistent, and cumulative. They are asymmetric because different airlines now have different political access to the same geography, persistent because airspace restrictions can remain long after the shock that produced them, and cumulative because losing one route increases dependence on whatever remains across the continent.
For instance, Chinese airlines retained access to Russian airspace after 2022, while Western carriers lost it. In summer 2019, Chinese airlines operated approximately 55 percent of scheduled capacity between China and Europe. By summer 2025, their share had increased to 83 percent, even though total market capacity stayed flat. Meanwhile, after losing access to Russian airspace, Finnair’s Helsinki-Tokyo flight time increased from about nine hours to 13, a 44 percent increase. Furthermore, during the latest Middle East disruption, airlines rerouted 1,150 flights per day to avoid the conflict area — forcing those aircraft to fly 206,000 additional kilometers every day. This manifested the “geopolitization” of the Eurasian civil aviation industry in a measurable form. Moreover, under certain conditions, the access attached to an airline’s political identity became a commercial asset.
The consequences may extend well beyond civil airline economics to the broader questions of strategic access, connectivity, and mobility across Eurasia.
The United States built its current exceptional capacity for global military mobility inside the civilian aviation ecosystem and still largely depends on commercial airlines, civil airports, cargo hubs, maintenance organizations, fuel infrastructure, and politically accessible airspace across much of the world. The Pentagon never had to own that entire system to benefit from it.
Afghanistan demonstrated how far that interdependency once extended. From 2009, the United States used the so-called Northern Distribution Network to move military cargo across Russia and Central Asia into Afghanistan. The United States and its allies relied not only on surface transit across Russia but on Russian geography and commercial Russian airlift itself — Volga-Dnepr Airlines’ Russian An-124s flew NATO strategic airlift missions, while a 2009 U.S.-Russian agreement opened Russian airspace to American military aircraft, including C-17s. By April 2011, more than 1,000 U.S. supply missions had transited Russian airspace, carrying more than 150,000 personnel, and the Russian city of Ulyanovsk was later added as another potential air-and-rail transit option. Access to northern Eurasia was therefore not at all peripheral to U.S. strategic mobility — it provided aircraft and alternative corridors that reduced dependence on Pakistan.
Today, first with the war in Ukraine, and now with the war in Iran, the risk is that the civilian network surrounding American military mobility in Eurasia becomes — with every new escalatory turn of events — narrower, more politically conditional, and more vulnerable, while military requirements in Eurasia, on the opposite, become more and more demanding.
Moreover, the problem is now escalating beyond just “closed airspace.” Kyiv, as a direct party to the conflict — itself an unusual dynamic in aviation safety — is urging foreign airlines to avoid Russian airspace and has formally asked the International Civil Aviation Organization to treat it as unsafe for civilian aviation because of regular Ukrainian drone operations. Earlier, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency also recommended against operations in Russian airspace west of 60 degrees east longitude, citing the danger of misidentification, the activation of Russian air defense systems, and limited available mitigation. At the same time, suspected Russian sabotage and GPS jamming have reached major European logistics hubs such as Leipzig/Halle and the Baltic Sea.
Europe and U.S. allies in NATO are therefore becoming part of the contested network itself.
Contested Mobility in Today’s Eurasia
With the Ukraine and the Iran wars ongoing, traffic that once dispersed across thousands of kilometers of northern Eurasia now sometimes funnels through the remaining geography between Russian airspace to the north and Iranian and Gulf airspace to the south. At one point, the route narrowed to a corridor of roughly 160 kilometers, with Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Turkey absorbing much of the displaced flow. This is what cumulative concentration of mobility looks like on a map when the loss of one large piece of usable geography increases the strategic and commercial importance of what remains.
“Contested mobility” is not a new term. The U.S. Government Accountability Office defines it as the military’s ability to transport equipment and personnel in a contested operational environment. The U.S. Transportation Command calls strategic airlift a “national asymmetric advantage.” Also, as U.S. Transportation Command commander Gen. Randall Reed put it in 2025: “Now that adversaries have the ability to contest logistics across the entire spectrum, from point-of-origin to point-of-use,” including non-kinetic disruption, the United States is “fighting to move, instead of moving to fight.”
U.S. Transportation Command’s own fleet comprises 52 C-5Ms and 223 C-17s, while the Civil Reserve Air Fleet program also commits civilian aircraft to augment them when needed. More broadly, while the Civil Reserve Air Fleet itself consists of the U.S. civil aircraft committed to augment military lift, the wider commercial ecosystem on which American mobility historically relied extended well beyond U.S. Transportation Command and Civil Reserve Air Fleet capabilities themselves. Russian Volga-Dnepr aircraft were once subcontracted through Atlas Air; Russian Polet Airlines aircraft — through United Parcel Service; and Azerbaijan’s Silk Way aircraft — through World Airways, while all three U.S. airlines named were Civil Reserve Air Fleet participants.
That ecosystem is becoming more politically constrained, reaching commercial relationships as well. U.S. Transportation Command’s May 2024 Unsuitable Vendor List included Air China Cargo, China Eastern, and China Southern, alongside mainly Russian-origin cargo carriers. Yet separation remains uneven. Delta, a Civil Reserve Air Fleet participant, terminated its codeshare with China Southern in 2025, while China Eastern remains a Delta partner. United Airlines, another Civil Reserve Air Fleet carrier, maintains a codeshare relationship with Air China. These partnerships are not part of Civil Reserve Air Fleet missions, but they expose the tension between tighter strategic vetting and continued dependence on a still interconnected civil aviation system.
During the 2021 Afghanistan evacuation, 18 Civil Reserve Air Fleet aircraft were activated but did not fly into Kabul. Instead, military aircraft first moved evacuees to intermediate bases, from which civilian carriers moved them onward. The Civil Reserve Air Fleet aircraft remain civilian, participating airlines retain operational control, continue to operate under civil safety requirements, and can refuse particular missions on operational risk grounds. Civil Reserve Air Fleet can augment lift, but it cannot “manufacture” overflight rights, politically accessible airports, or operationally acceptable corridors.
The last three mobility studies by the U.S. government each validated a requirement for 275 strategic airlift aircraft, matching the 52 and 223 in the existing U.S. Transportation Command organic fleet stated above. The 2026 Congressional Research Service study, however, notes that while 223 aircraft were procured, the U.S. Air Force now operates 222 after a hull loss, and one C-17 belongs to the NATO Strategic Airlift Capability — so the usable organic U.S. Transportation Command fleet is already below the paper figure before any question of political access arises.
Those studies also go beyond fleet size. The 2020 Mobility Capability Requirements Study examined contested environments and the wider mobility enterprise — the global network of airfields, seaports, and surface routes together with commercial providers and military capacity. Although the full study is classified, a senior U.S. Transportation Command official later characterized it as:
innovative in advancing the joint community’s knowledge on operating within the contested environments in terms of understanding great power adversary capabilities to interdict strategic mobility, affect the timing of force flow into theater, and the impact on the campaign.
What remains less visible, though, at least in those studies’ publicly available discourse — also modeling contested access in a theater before 2022 — is a sequential loss of alternatives across several theaters, when the second loss becomes more consequential because the first has already removed another route. What happens if the wider civilian network on which military mobility also depends becomes (geo)politically constrained well before actual conflict begins? And if the disruption mechanism becomes cumulative?
The Ukraine war removes a giant piece of usable aviation geography in northern Eurasia. Then, traffic reroutes through alternatives in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Gulf, increasing their value. If one of those southern corridors is later disrupted, the cost of disruption becomes greater because the first crisis already concentrated the network, which can trigger the progressive reduction in politically, commercially, and operationally viable pathways through which civil aviation — and, consequently, U.S. strategic mobility — can function.
Developments in the Caucasus since 2022 made that concentration visible. Azerbaijan’s air navigation system handled about 278 flights a day at the beginning of 2022. By the end of 2025, the figure had more than doubled to 695, while annual overflights increased from 47,065 in 2021 to 261,085 in 2025. After the disruption of Gulf airspace in early 2026, daily traffic rose further. Aircraft themselves followed the same geography when two Boeing 747-400 freighters previously operated by Russia’s Sky Gates left Russia at the end of February 2022 after repossession and, within days, were re-registered in Azerbaijan and operating for Silk Way West Airlines between Baku, Europe, and China.
The commercial network therefore did what aviation networks normally do — it adapted. But adaptation also concentrated more traffic and scarce aircraft in a smaller part of Eurasian geography. And this new concentration created a vulnerability of its own when the South Caucasus corridor faced confrontation risk between Azerbaijan and Armenia from 2023 to 2024.
Smaller disruptions only compound the same problem. Military tensions around Israel have repeatedly emptied parts of the Eastern Mediterranean airline network, the May 2025 Indian-Pakistani confrontation pushed traffic south toward Oman and the Gulf, and recurrent military activity around the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan places further pressure on Northeast Asian routes. Taken together with the larger disruptions caused by the wars in Ukraine and Iran, these smaller shocks further consume the alternatives on which the Eurasian aviation network increasingly depends.
The Gulf shows the same concentration. Dubai handled a record 95.2 million passengers in 2025, up 3.1 percent year on year, while Middle Eastern airports’ connectivity rose 28 percent in 2024 and intercontinental connectivity stood 16 percent above pre-pandemic levels. That growth has many causes, but once northern European-Asian geography became unavailable to many Western carriers after 2022, the Gulf became more important as an east-west bridge.
Then the Gulf itself was hit. The 2026 Iran war brought airport closures, airline cancellations, and rerouting. Dubai handled 31.5 million passengers in the first half of 2026, down 31.3 percent year on year, and aircraft movements fell 32.1 percent. With Russian airspace already unavailable to Western operators, the Iran war disrupted the southern Eurasian alternatives on which the network had become more dependent. On March 31, 2026, EUROCONTROL recorded 56 percent fewer flights between the Middle East and Europe, including services overflying Europe to and from North America. This episode showed why a second loss of geography can be more consequential after the first one has already removed an alternative.
The military network adapted to the same geography. Ahead of the Iran war in February 2026, the United States moved around 150 military aircraft into Europe and the Middle East, with more than half of the newly deployed aircraft positioned at bases in Europe to remain beyond Iran’s missile reach.
That distance had to be bridged. In May, U.S. Air Force KC-135 tankers launched from the European Command area to refuel B-1 bombers operating over the Central Command area, making European airfields part of the support architecture for Middle East operations.
Political access compressed that architecture further when Spain denied its airspace and bases to U.S. aircraft supporting attacks on Iran. Fifteen U.S. military aircraft relocated from Rota and Morón after the Spanish refusal, most of them KC-135 tankers, with at least seven moving to Ramstein in Germany. The Spanish case illustrates a different form of access denial from the Russian one, where the closure was adversarial, structural, and very durable. The Spanish case was still allied, issue-specific, and politically more reversible.
As a result, air mobility still existed, and the distances were still physically “flyable,” but the number of (geo)politically usable places from which the mission could actually be supported had shrunk.
Finally, wider Europe itself is now the region where several forms of similar “air mobility compression” overlap. In summer 2025, EUROCONTROL estimated that it controlled only about 80 percent of the airspace available before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the same year, the conflict expanded with radio-frequency interference reportedly originating from Russia.
This is happening while Europe is simultaneously trying to move more military traffic through civil airport networks. In particular, the European Union adopted four priority multimodal military-mobility corridors in March 2025. Under the 2021 to 2027 Connecting Europe Facility, 1.69 billion euros (about $1.9 billion) was allocated for military mobility. The European Commission now treats ports, airports, bridges, tunnels, and energy and communications nodes as strategic dual-use infrastructure, while acknowledging increased subcontracting of military operations to civilian carriers.
Aircraft Become Geopolitical Assets Too
Airspace or airport infrastructure is not the only part of Eurasian aviation becoming “geopoliticized.” The aircraft themselves are now sometimes geopolitical assets. This applies especially to the widebody airlift, where the most useful aircraft are finite — no longer being produced — and difficult to replace. Boeing no longer produces either the 747 or the C-17. The Soviet-built Antonov An-124 fleet is similarly limited.
The remaining aircraft are also performing several roles at once. Atlas Air, Kalitta Air, and National Airlines — all participants in the Civil Reserve Air Fleet program — have used Boeing 747 freighters under U.S. defense contracts to transport weapons to Europe for Ukraine. The same commercial fleets simultaneously remained part of more and more disrupted global trade. Immobilizing one part of that fleet removes capacity from all potential users.
The fate of Russian AirBridgeCargo’s Boeing 747-8 freighter fleet stranded in Moscow since 2022 illustrates the point. The airline ceased operations in 2022, and Western lessors pursued the return of the aircraft through litigation and government channels without recovering a single AirBridgeCargo aircraft from Russia. Russian authorities had little economic reason to retain the fleet: by AirBridgeCargo’s own estimates, its 747-8 fleet provided roughly 1 million tons of annual capacity prewar, versus no more than 150,000 tons a year for Russia’s entire international air cargo market. More than a dozen 747-8 freighter aircraft have consequently spent years parked at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow, unable to perform the international role for which the fleet was built.
The market did try to find “another way through.” In the spring and summer of 2022, AirBridgeCargo and the U.A.E.-based Etihad discussed a structure under which the 747 fleet could be moved outside Russia and operated through the Abu Dhabi hub, with aircraft and crews effectively re-established there. AirBridgeCargo also sought permission from Russian authorities to return leased aircraft abroad. The commercial logic was straightforward — international demand for freighter capacity remained strong, while keeping such a large 747 fleet inside the much smaller Russian cargo market made little economic sense. Yet, the proposed economic solution did not materialize as political restrictions surrounded transactions because Russian actions in Ukraine overtook that commercial logic. Aviation could relocate the business model, but it could not remove political factors attached to the aircraft.
The AirBridgeCargo fleet immobilization, therefore, cannot be understood only in commercial terms. In the Russian case, the aircraft caught in the geopolitical confrontation have acquired some of the characteristics of “trophies,” in which possession itself became politically valuable even when the asset was economically unnecessary. A different mechanism can be seen in Canada and Germany, which continue to hold Russian-linked Antonov An-124s at Toronto Pearson and Leipzig airports, respectively, under their own seizure orders based on sanctions and judicial measures. The legal and political circumstances are not the same. But different mechanisms are producing the same result when aircraft become part of geopolitics rather than just commercial assets.
Another contrast becomes sharper in the case of Bank of China-controlled lessor BOC Aviation. After winning a $406.2 million judgment against AirBridgeCargo in New York, the lessor — just like its Western peers — still could not recover two 747-8 freighters from Russia. However, within months after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s October 2023 visit to Beijing, Russian authorities suddenly permitted the two BOC aircraft to leave in March 2024 — an outcome Western lessors had been unable to obtain. A subsequent English High Court judgment concluded that China’s status as a “friendly” country was likely part of why their return proved possible.
Even more telling, months later, Atlas Air put the same two aircraft into service in the United States. The episode is a perfect illustration of contested mobility in today’s world: geopolitics determined whether and where the aircraft could move, and the global market determined where that scarce capacity was ultimately most valuable.
Scarcity adds another layer. Boeing ended C-17 production in 2015, and the final 747 was delivered in 2023. At the same time, demand for the capabilities these aircraft provide is increasing. For instance, in 2025, more than two-thirds of the value of global trade in AI-related goods moved by air, including, specifically, 747s, because some AI server racks are now so large, they increasingly require specific 747 freighter capabilities like a nose cargo door. The wars in Ukraine and Iran add further pressure by increasing military airlift requirements, lengthening routes, and concentrating demand on a finite pool of long-range cargo aircraft. Against that backdrop, in September 2026, an E.U.-funded study on strategic airlift has identified two options for sustaining Europe’s outsized cargo capacity — a deep modernization of the Ukrainian Antonov An-124s or the development of a new European aircraft to replace the C-17s.
This “mobility compression” is not exclusively a Western problem. Russian airlines have lost access to much of Western aircraft leasing, manufacturer support, parts, and maintenance networks. The effect, however, is not symmetrical. Modern Russia never possessed an equivalent of the extraordinarily wide global mobility ecosystem on which the United States could rely. U.S. Transportation Command itself argues that no other nation or combination of nations can generate comparable global airlift output.
China illustrates another asymmetry. Its airlines have retained access to Russian airspace and gained a geographical advantage over many Western competitors. But much of the heavy freighter capacity with which Chinese carriers exploit trans-Siberian airspace still depends on American-built aircraft. Nearly 60 Boeing 777 freighters are operated by 6 Chinese carriers, while SF Airlines — China’s largest all-cargo airline by fleet — relies entirely on Boeing types, including 747s and 767s for its long-haul network.
That dependence is now itself becoming “geopolitical.” After almost a decade without a major Chinese Boeing order, aircraft deliveries and future purchases became part of the wider U.S.-Chinese trade negotiations. China agreed in 2026 to a prospective 200-aircraft Boeing package while also beginning to diversify — Air China Cargo has ordered 10 Airbus A350 freighters.
Finally, Russia itself demonstrated what access can make possible in Eurasia immediately before its “special military operation” against Ukraine. During the January 2022 Collective Security Treaty Organization intervention in Kazakhstan, more than 70 Il-76s and five An-124s were assembled for rapid deployment after President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev requested assistance. The episode shows that aircraft can generate exceptional mobility when the political relationship opens the geography. But they cannot by themselves guarantee that the same geography will remain available in the next crisis.
From Aviation Security to Mobility Security
After 9/11, aviation security was reorganized around protecting aircraft and airports, screening passengers, baggage, and cargo. With today’s geopolitical environment, the object of protection should expand to the whole network that makes movement possible — airspace, navigation, fuel, power, cargo handling, maintenance, communications, insurance, alternative airports, industrial supply, and political access.
The question is not simply whether European-Asian traffic can route around Russia or Iran, but what remains if Russian airspace or parts of the Gulf airspace remain disrupted for Western operators for years to come — especially if that disruption ever overlaps with European navigation interference, the loss of a major E.U. cargo hub, or a major escalation of Russian-NATO tensions.
For the Pentagon and its allies in Eurasia, civil aviation should be mapped as an integral part of military mobility, including which carriers or maintenance facilities are politically and operationally usable, which airports become essential during mobilisation, where military and civilian users compete for fuel, which alternative corridors survive, and what happens to strategic mobility when routes become several hours longer.
For decades, American power benefited from a physical globalization dividend. Much of the world contained functioning airports, commercial aircraft, maintenance, fuel, communications, and accessible airspace. The United States did not need to own the whole system to derive military value from it. The Civil Reserve Air Fleet and NATO’s commercially organized Ukrainian Antonov lift through the Strategic Airlift International Solution initiative are both expressions of that dividend.
But as the international system in Eurasia fragments, an aircraft may exist but be unavailable, an airport may be open but politically inaccessible, an air corridor may be legally open but commercially unacceptable, and a fleet may still contain 275 strategic airlift aircraft, while the surrounding geopolitics reduces its usability.
That is the fundamental change underway since 2022. Geopolitics is no longer just “interrupting” global aviation — it is reshaping the architecture through which global mobility is possible. If the air transport ecosystem in Eurasia becomes geographically narrower, politically more conditional, and industrially harder to reproduce, the strategic value of every remaining route, aircraft, hub, and commercial partner rises — and so does the cost of losing one.
The Pentagon should therefore treat contested mobility in Eurasia not simply as a fleet-sizing problem, but as a network resilience problem. The task could be assessing the amount of usable lift after the sequential loss of airspace, hubs, political access, commercial carriers, and scarce aircraft types — along with pre-negotiating the alternative overflight rights, commercial capacity, and industrial options needed before a crisis begins. Much of that is already being implemented when U.S. Transportation Command leads the Joint Deployment and Distribution Enterprise, and studies contested mobility.
What appears to be missing from the public debate is a requirement to conceptualize, assess, and prepare for the cumulative geographical loss of access across multiple theaters at the same time — a dynamic that is already becoming visible across Eurasia. The relevant question should not be simply whether the United States possesses “275 strategic airlift aircraft,” but how much effective mobility those aircraft can deliver if access to Russian airspace, Gulf transit hubs, and major European or Asian hubs is degraded or denied simultaneously.
Alex Kolbin is a London-based geopolitical risk analyst and director of ELSER Consulting, a boutique intelligence firm. After a decade in the global aviation industry, several years at the PIR Center in Moscow working on nonproliferation and arms control, and experience with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Kolbin now focuses his work on the implications of regional conflicts for global supply chains and wider geopolitical competition.
