MIAMI (Sputnik) – The drop in Russia’s demand for Lufthansa airline services is a result of the anti-Moscow sanctions, Chairman and CEO of Lufthansa Carsten Spohr told journalists, after the company announced plans to suspend several flights to Russia.
Lufthansa German Airlines announced earlier in June that it would cancel some of its flights to Russia including from Frankfurt to Samara, Nizhny Novgorod and Moscow.
“We have revised our routes to Russia because of less demand for sure being a consequence of the sanctions and less international economic relations with Russia,” Spohr stated at the International Air Transport Association (IATA) summit in Miami on Sunday.
“In our case the consequences of less demand resulted in less operating routes to Russia,” Spohr asserted.
Lufthansa’s CEO stated that the company’s plans to restore the flights in the future depended on politics.
Spohr also said that Lufthansa is not planning on operating any flights to Crimea at this time.
“No, not currently. No,” Spohr said on Sunday when asked whether the company is planning on doing any operations in Crimea.
Crimea rejoined Russia in March 2014, following a referendum in which 96 percent of participants voted in favour of the move.
The West refused to recognize the results of the referendum and imposed an economic embargo against Crimea in 2014, having also introduced several rounds of sanctions against Russia.
Russia's Aeroflot CEO Vitaly Savelyev announced in April that the company was planning to increase passenger traffic to Crimea.
