This is simply not true. Go to flightradar24.com and compare how many flights you see going over Siberia (in particular, Eastern Siberia (which some articles say is to be the focus of the proposed ban)), versus elsewhere. Almost nobody flies there, passenger or cargo.
Setting aside the issue of the fact that blocking it would be cutting off their nose to spite their face (overflight fees), Europe would very likely retaliate by blocking Russian access to their airspaces. And a large majority of Russian international flights *do* go over European airspace. The impact would be grossly disproportionally negative to Russia.
The key aspect in all of this is proportionality. Europe and the US begin with a huge advantage over Russia, in that their combined economies are 16 times larger than Russia’s. So if they cut off X dollars worth of trade with Russia, if that makes up Y percent of the GDP of the US + Europe, it’s Y times 16 percent of the Russian GDP, if all else is equal.
That’s where multipliers come in. You want to make cuts on things that will be hard for your opponent to replace, making them have to pay high prices on purchased goods / sell their goods at lower prices. If they can find replacement sellers / buyers at all.
Russia’s “energy weapon” is often talked about like that because, while oil and gas are commodities, the quantity being talked about is so large that it’ll take major, expensive efforts on the part of the EU to displace consumption and increase imports to make up for it. But the issue is, Russia doesn’t want to use it. It’s the cornerstone of their economy. Can you imagine willingly writing off half of your economy? Yeah, you’ll hurt Europe’s GDP by 5-10% if you totally cut it off, but you’ll send yourself into third-world status. So while of course they want to threaten it, they really, really don’t want to do it.
All other issues, however, are weapons that work in Europe’s favor. With a few exceptions, Russia sells commodities and imports (apart from food) specialty goods. Russia threatened to stop buying apples from Poland? Big deal, apples are fungible. If Russia would threaten to stop selling diamonds to Belgium? Big deal, diamonds are fungible. There will be costs, of course, but they don’t have any serious multipliers. However, Russia buys tons and tons of not just consumer goods, but industrial equipment - their domestic production is way undersized and outdated. If you have, say, a refinery built to take a particular custom-built German catalytic unit and it breaks, and the German company that designed and built it is no longer allowed to replace it for you? Yeah, good luck with that one. Restrictions on high-tech industrial goods can have massive multipliers. Russia only has one relevant export field of this nature (rocket engines), and it’s way smaller than their imports that are affected suchly. And their multiplier on rocket engine exports has been greatly weakened by the rise of OSC and SpaceX’s private launchers anyway.
Go to FR 24 NOW...
Just like the North Atlantic Track, the Polar routes have peak and off peak times. Right now, the remainder of the west-bound flights are nearly done.
In about 3 hours, the east-bound NAT flights will begin.
It is evening in Europe now, so the Asia-bound flights will just now be in the air.
Again looking at FR24, the east-bound surge from Europe to Asia is just beginning.
Note how many DHL aircraft are over northern Russia, right now, for example.
Finnair’s Asia trips are just now leaving. The number of Euro aircraft heading east will grow in the next couple of hours.
On the other side, the day’s trans-polar flights to China haven’t begun yet, and last night’s east coast to china flights are just now nearing the Russia Mongolia border.