On January 18, 2023 a State Emergency Service Eurocopter EC225 Super Puma crashed into a kindergarten in Brovary, a suburb east of Kyiv. The accident killed senior Interior Ministry officials, including Minister Denys Monastyrsky, members of his team, three crew members and civilians on the ground, and left dozens injured. Ukrainian authorities immediately opened criminal and technical investigations and public officials framed the catastrophe as another dimension of the war that has been fought across Ukraine since February 2022.
The Brovary crash is plainly a human tragedy. It is also a sharp reminder that military conflicts do not remain neatly confined to front lines. They change the operational environment for every aircraft, for air traffic management, and for the legal regimes that were built around peacetime assumptions. Even when commercial flights are suspended, state aircraft continue to move people and materiel over populated areas. The safety rules that govern those flights are often less visible and less harmonized than the rules for civilian air carriers.
Since Russia’s full scale invasion, Ukrainian civil airspace has been closed to ordinary commercial flights and European regulators have issued strong warnings about flying near the conflict zone. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency and Eurocontrol labeled the Ukrainian flight information regions as an active conflict zone and advised operators to avoid them because of the risk of intentional targeting or misidentification of civil aircraft. That closure reduced the exposure of scheduled air services, but it did not remove risk for state and emergency operations that must continue to support wartime duties and crisis response.
Those exceptions make sound operational sense. Governments must move leaders, emergency responders and supplies. But that necessity sharpens two problems that deserve urgent legal and regulatory attention. First, exemptions from civilian airspace restrictions are effective only if accompanied by transparent, centralized authorisation, robust risk assessment and clear flight rules that all operators and the military understand. Second, the oversight that applies to state-operated aircraft can be inconsistent. State helicopters are sometimes flown under different maintenance, recorder and flight following regimes than civilian aircraft, producing blind spots for investigators and for the public when tragedy strikes.
The shadow of past disasters makes these issues more than academic. The MH17 shootdown in 2014 remains the stark precedent for why conflict zones demand caution. The Dutch Safety Board investigation concluded that the aircraft was struck by a high energy ground to air missile and recommended that states assess and, where necessary, close airspace over hostilities to protect civil aviation. That inquiry also highlighted the difficulty of making decisions about airspace when commercial imperatives and incomplete information pull in different directions. Lessons from MH17 were about both intelligence and governance: closing or restricting airspace is a political decision with technical consequences.
Brovary’s specifics remain under investigation. Ukrainian officials and investigatory bodies have been reported as considering technical malfunction, pilot error or deliberate destruction among the possible causes. Those are normal lines of inquiry. But safety policy cannot wait on the final cause to begin fixing structural weaknesses. There are practical, legally feasible steps that Kyiv and international partners should take immediately to reduce risk to both participants and civilians.
First, harmonize and publish a clear framework for state flight authorisations in conflict conditions. When airspace is formally closed to civilian traffic, any permitted state flights should be authorised through a single, named authority and accompanied by a documented risk assessment. That authority should publish at least high level criteria for exemptions, the risk mitigation measures required and the communications expectations with military air defence units so that misidentification risk is reduced. Plain language rules help pilots and reduce ambiguity in crisis. This is a governance reform, not a technical novelty, and it can be achieved through executive orders or ministerial regulation.
Second, require state-operated passenger aircraft that carry civilian officials to meet minimum safety management standards equivalent to those for commercial operators. That includes regular third party maintenance audits, mandatory flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder carriage unless there is a documented, temporary technical impossibility, and routine safety management system reporting. When senior officials travel, best practice in many jurisdictions is to avoid placing several principal officers on the same aircraft; wartime conditions only strengthen that need. Several news outlets noted debate in Kyiv about revising VIP transport rules after the crash. Those procedural changes are straightforward and inexpensive relative to their potential benefit.
Third, improve civil military coordination for air picture and identify friend or foe processes. In wars the most serious risk to aircraft is misidentification by air defence systems. That is a technical problem with legal consequences. States need written protocols that require exchange of flight plans, secure transponder practices, and preplanned corridors or windows for authorised flights. Where electronic identification is unavailable or compromised, visual or procedural mitigations must be put in place and the decision to accept risk should be recorded at the appropriate political level.
Fourth, increase transparency of accident investigation and accountability. In post conflict and contested environments, evidence can be lost or contaminated. Investigations should be independent, timely and consistent with ICAO Annex 13 principles so that technical findings can command public trust. Where state actors operate the aircraft, extraordinary steps may be necessary to guarantee independence, including international technical assistance for wreckage examination and data analysis when domestic capacities are affected by conflict. The MH17 experience showed how critical credible, independent investigation is for establishing both cause and responsibility.
Finally, international partners and aviation safety regulators should update their guidance to reflect prolonged conflicts. EASA and Eurocontrol advisories issued after the 2022 invasion were essential. Regulators should continue to refine conflict zone guidance, support states in implementing risk based closures, and help build the civil military interfaces that make temporary authorisations safer. The goal is pragmatic: reduce the non-combatant toll of war on skies above towns, schools and apartments.
The Brovary tragedy will be parsed by investigators for months. Families and communities will grieve for years. Policy makers must treat the event as a prompt to act, not as a reason for sterile debate. Lawmakers can adopt clearer authorisation rules, aviation authorities can insist on consistent safety standards for state flying, and military and civil controllers can codify identification and corridor procedures. These are administrative and legal reforms that do not depend on solving the war. They are, however, essential if we are to prevent more civilians and emergency crews from becoming collateral victims when conflict spills into the airspace above our schools and homes.