News X World: Zelensky threatens Russian civil air space ‘to close the skies over Russia’

minutes 19 – 30

The headline I have assigned above relates to the second topic in my morning interview with News X World within their omnibus hourly news bulletin. Indeed, Zelensky said yesterday that foreign airlines, insurers and the general public should be aware that Ukrainian drones will be endangering the safety of air travel over Russia and that his intention is to shut down air travel to and inside Russia. If he proceeds with this threat, then a full-blown European war is likely to follow soon afterwards.

As I say in the interview, this is a very important act of escalation. If indeed Russian air space is closed this will have a dramatic negative effect on the Russian economy and on contacts with the world at large. Putin will be compelled by public opinion and by the Kremlin elites to finally decapitate the Kievan regime and/or to deliver missile strikes to any and all of the European powers that are encouraging and enabling Zelensky in his madness.

So far Putin has made no response, but former President Medvedev has issued nonspecific counter threats. In the meantime, I have cancelled plans to fly to Petersburg later this month and will try my luck at the awful bus crossings from Estonia.

The first topic was the thwarted drone attack at Leipzig airport on 4 August which German Chancellor Merz used to accuse the Russians of hybrid warfare threatening German security. He announced yesterday that Germany has ordered the closing of the Russian General Consulate in Bonn and of the Russian House which, like similar centers in Paris and Brussels, is a point of cultural exchange where concerts, film showings and lectures are given and where Russian language courses are arranged for adults and children.

Without choosing between Merz’s allegations of Russian responsibility for the drone incident in Leipzig and President Putin’s response that the drone was planted there by Germans, not by Russia, I state here that all charges by the Collective West going back a decade or more that Russia is waging a hybrid war, that Russia is behind cyber attacks, etc. are pure propaganda and pitiful at that. In the context of an ongoing Russia-Ukraine war that has killed perhaps two million soldiers altogether and caused hundreds of billions of dollars of damages to homes, factories, generating plants and more, the outrage of Merz over a single drone at a German airport would be laughable if it weren’t being vented to take us closer to WWIII and to keep himself in power in a country that detests him, Germany.

All of the hype about hybrid war, which the general population scarcely understands, has one purpose only: to deflect attention away from the real threat that Russia poses to Europe if it feels sufficiently threatened – namely use of its nuclear weapons, of which it is the largest owner of both tactical and strategic versions in the world. It is no exaggeration to say that Russia can wipe a country like Germany, or the UK, or even the USA off the map, to reduce whole countries to cinders within 24 hours if it so wishes. You will never hear Merz or von der Leyen or Kallas mention that unpleasant detail in public. All that you get from this group of thugs in power is accusations against Russia such as Kallas’s saying today that the drone incident at Leipzig proves that Russia is a state sponsor of terror.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2026