Ukraine, Lugano airport director: “via Russian private planes, Ukrainian and Polish ones arrive”

As the EU confronts Russia’s sixth package of sanctions and Italy continues to struggle with the aftermath of the freeze on oligarchs’ assets, especially super yachts, Switzerland handles issues of Russian-registered aircraft that failed ‘to take flight’ before the sanctions come into force. A total of six remained on the ground, 2 confined in the hangars of the national airport of Geneva and 4 in the national airport of Basel, according to the Adnkronos from the Federal Office of Civil Aviation (FOCA). The new movement underway in recent weeks, however, is another: “What we are witnessing now – explains the director of the Lugano-Agno airport, Davide Pedrioli – is the repositioning in Swiss airports of private planes arriving from Poland and from Ukraine”. Looking for a safer port. A migration underway throughout Western Europe, according to the director of the Swiss regional airport, from which the powerful of the earth usually transit incognito and which since 2019, after the abandonment of Swiss, no longer has scheduled flights, but only commercial aviation. “They are aircraft relocated for safety reasons. They replaced the Russian ones – he explains – We don’t have any, our airport hosts medium categories, not 50-60 ton aircraft with 10 thousand km of autonomy that require landing strips at least 2000 meters long. They are demanding aircraft, in Geneva they had problems confining them to a space where no one could enter avoiding blocking an entire airport “, the airport director told Adnkronos, who lost traffic with the entry into force of the sanctions by 2-3% despite not hosting at that precise moment neither Russian-owned nor Russian-registered aircraft at that precise moment. “We had a couple of them a year, although every day they landed with us on twenty flights at least two-three from Moscow. But I know – he reports – of other European countries, in whose airports the planes of Russian oligarchs were parked, where a few hours before the entry into force there were take-off scenes on the edge of the picturesque ”. No oligarchs at Lugano airport? “I haven’t seen any, but they certainly favor less showy, off-the-radar airports, like ours. So I think so, we have received some ”. “I imagine – he continues – sometime before the war, two years before the beginning of my office, the president of the Russian Federation also arrived. But I didn’t go into detail because in our service there are a series of benefits, including confidentiality. I’m not going to see if Putin has arrived “. Pedrioli points out that his airport” is not just the scent of wheels and kerosene, but an intermodal transport hub in which you change the way you travel with expenses between helicopter and limousines wandering around to 150 thousand euros “.” These are transport systems that can clearly be used only by a certain group of characters of this type, who need an airport like ours that is intrinsically safe, for a scenario of high risks “. the presence in the Ticino region of the Lugano airport, with its intrinsic characteristics and the possibility of allowing direct connections, to have favored the choice of the president of the Swiss Confederation, Ignazio Cassis, to host the next Conference on 4 and 5 July for the reconstruction of Ukraine in Lugano: “We have been preparing for months. The security services, the Confederation, the canton, the army are engaged in strengthening the services. Fortunately – the Director remarks – it was an event that had been scheduled for some time, because the Conference was planned well before February 24th and everything has changed since then. It will be really heavy – he concludes – the safety device set “. (By Roberta Lanzara)