Aviation Expert: New Sanctions to Be a Shock for Belavia

Restrictions will hit the company hard.

No matter what the Belarusian authorities claim, the Western sanctions are working. Belavia is a good example.

Quite recently, the State Air Company lost half of its leased aircraft fleet. The International Air Transport Association has disconnected it from the international billing and mutual settlements system. Kirill Novikov, an expert on transport and infrastructure, spoke about the consequences of the situation in the Belsat Studio programme.

The expert believes the Belarusian authorities themselves are to blame for the current situation, while the consequences of the next sanctions will significantly complicate the work of the airline.

"These two systems have been in operation in the world for 50 years. It simplifies mutual settlements, just as in other forms of transport that have similar systems. Everything is very simply: shippers or ticket agents for passengers do not pay companies directly, they pay through these billing systems. Since the development of the Internet, these systems have become major ones, and most airlines in the world use them. The current Belarusian government has done everything to fall under these sanctions. The disconnection was predictable. In my opinion, it will hit the airline very hard, as the mutual settlements are already set up to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy. Belavia will now have to handle mutual settlements manually, which makes it very difficult to keep track of documentation in the company.

Kirill Novikov believes Belarus can practically avoid the consequences of sanctions, but it will be expensive.

"The world dictates trends, the market creates convenient systems, which sooner or later everyone comes to. Of course, they can create and spend a lot of time and money, but mutual settlements act every hour and second, and the loss from disconnection from this system is approximately equal to the fact that today Belarus, for example, will be disconnected from the VIZA and MasterCard payment system. The scale is approximately the same.

The airline will return to the two-part check: the request for settlement and the receipt of the report will be controlled by the airline itself. And the mistakes that will be made, and they will certainly occur, will eventually have an impact on the company's revenue, which has already dropped sharply after the ban on flights to the European Union".

According to the expert, Belarus initially started developing civil aviation incorrectly, the current government is also to blame for this. However, Kirill Novikov emphasizes that Belarusian aviation employs professionals. They have also somehow become victims of the regime.

"Professionals work in the civil aviation of Belarus. They work in an environment where the tone is set by politics, the policy of the authorities, which is now illegitimate. Frankly speaking, it was a wrong decision to leave monocarriers in the country with an open market on the border with the EU. And today, Lukashenka's regime simply profits from it".

Kirill Novikov adds that, unfortunately, ordinary Belarusians, who will not be able to fly to other countries normally, will be the first to suffer in this situation.