As China’s reopening creates a shortage of passenger jets, Russia and the West are running out of weapons to throw into Ukraine

(Originally published Jan. 16 in “What in the World“) Ukrainian officials say a Russian missile that destroyed an apartment building in Dnipro Saturday,* killing at least 30 civilians, appeared to have been a ballistic missile fired from the north.

Not only does that suggest that Russia is buying more missiles from Iran, but that it is using Belarus as a staging ground. Ukraine’s defense minister, Hanna Maliar, earlier said the missile appeared to have been a Kh-22 cruise missile, designed to sink ships. But a spokesman for the Ukrainian air force, Col. Yuriy Ihnat, said the missile appeared to have been fired at relatively close range from the north.

Ukraine has been warning that Russia may be planning to launch a new offensive from Belarus. And late last month, Belarus protested Ukraine’s shooting down of an S-300 air-defense missile over Belarus.

London has confirmed that it will send 14 Challenger 2 battle tanks to Ukraine. Poland and Finland have both promised to send some of their German-made Leopard 2 tanks. Germany is also considering sending Ukraine Leopards as well, but their manufacturer, Rheinmetall, has warned that it wouldn’t be able to complete the necessary repairs and refurbishment until next year.

With China becoming one of the last, if not the very last, country to reopen its borders, global air travel is slowly recovering from the pandemic. The International Air Transport Association predicts the industry will have fully recovered by next year. Opening the floodgates of a dramatically more vulnerable population of 1.2 billion potential hosts may be the best news Covid-19 has had since it spawned the Omicron variant a little over a year ago.

But until China manages to revive the pandemic with a new strain, the travel industry is faced with a very different challenge: a shortage of jets. Supply-chain bottlenecks, high inflation and rising interest rates have left airlines and the leasing companies they rely on short of narrow-body aircraft.