Uzhhorod International Airport UDJ / UKLU

Uzhhorod's runway starts about 90 m from the Slovak border, so departures and arrivals must cross into Slovak airspace under a bilateral agreement (draft endorsed by Ukraine's government in June 2020, signed in September 2020) that revived an arrangement which had lapsed in 2016; the runway itself is a short 2,038 m strip with no ILS, ruling out narrowbody jets like the 737 or A320 even if flights resumed. Civil traffic has been suspended since Ukraine closed its airspace on 24 Feb 2022, and in March 2024 the Zakarpattia Regional Council voted to liquidate the airport's municipal operating enterprise (liquidation registered 6 May 2024) amid disputes over the city's rising land values and allegations of political motivation, leaving only a skeleton caretaker crew with no operator certificate. In October 2024 the field was reported handed to the Ministry of Internal Affairs for a proposed European civil-protection aviation hub, but the Presidential Office said that same month the project was on hold, with only irregular charter use floated for now. Economist Iryna Kosse has written that Uzhhorod is otherwise the safest of Ukraine's western airports to reopen (least shelling risk, closest to the border) but that Slovak transit permission is the real gating factor and is unlikely given tense bilateral relations, separate from Ukraine's own domestic readiness. The pax figure (2,782 in 2019) is the last full pre-war year for which a count could be independently located; a widely circulated 7,600-for-2021 figure could not be verified against a primary source, and a Windrose Kyiv-Uzhhorod route resumed 2 Jun 2021, so a higher 2021 total is plausible but unconfirmed.