Over the weekend, several airports in Moscow were forced to stop air traffic due to drone alerts. In clips on social media, chaos is visible at the airports, where travelers impatiently waited to get going.
All this creates irritation, says Johan Norberg, security policy analyst and Russia expert at the Total Defense Research Institute, FOI.
According to the independent Moscow Times, this is the fourth closure of air traffic around the Russian capital recently.
Since the summer season started in May, Russian airports have been forced to close more than 260 times, in some cases for more than a day, according to the Russian travel association Ator.
"More dramatic"
Keir Giles, an expert at the Russia and Eurasia program at the think tank Chatham House, says that Ukraine has openly declared that it wants to make the war felt by Russians.
This is one of the more dramatic and obvious ways that Ukraine has the capacity to do so. It's not just annoying, but has direct costs for ordinary Russians, he says.
At the same time, the effect is limited, he emphasizes, since the Kremlin's top leadership has decided that the war will continue regardless of the cost.
So it will take a long time before the disruptions and hardships that ordinary Russians are going through lead to any noticeable political effect in Ukraine's favor.
How clearly the war is actually felt by the ordinary Russian is difficult to say, despite sanctions and Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory.
Russia has the enormous advantage of almost total control over the information that reaches ordinary Russians through state media, and how it is presented. It is possible for those who only watch state media to believe that the war does not affect Russia at all.
The battlefield decides
Norberg believes that another Ukrainian goal is to target air traffic in general, which, given Russia's enormous breadth, is extremely important for holding the country together, alongside the railway – which has also been attacked frequently.
He also does not believe that the attacks will have any decisive significance, even if they create irritation and make the war difficult to ignore.
We must not forget that it is a war, and it is military means and the battlefields that decide, says Norberg.
