Qatar Airways to launch new daily service to Ukraine

Qatar Airways has announced that it will launch a new direct service to Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, from August 28, 2017.

The launch of service to the Ukrainian capital comes as part of the airline’s expansion in Eastern Europe, with services to Skopje in Macedonia and Prague in Czech Republic to follow this summer, Qatar Airways said.

The new route will be served by an Airbus A320 aircraft featuring 12 seats in business class and 132 seats in economy class.

The new service will operate as flight QR297, departing Doha at 3.15pm and arriving in Kiev at 8.55pm. The return flight QR298 will depart from the Ukrainian capital at 11.45pm, arriving in the Qatari capital at 5.05am the next day.

Qatar Airways group CEO Akbar Al Baker said: “Our new service to Kyiv [Kiev] is part of our expedited expansion plans, which aim at unlocking new destinations to enhance our passengers’ connectivity to our extensive global network.”

The new route announcement comes after the airline was forced to stop flights to 18 Middle East destinations last month due to the regional political crisis.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt cut diplomatic and travel links with Qatar in June, with the crisis showing no signs to being resolved.

Read more: Tillerson ends talks in Jeddah, Qatar crisis drags on

Last week, Qatar Airways announced that it would start flights to Sohar in Oman and Prague from August.

The carrier plans to launch services to 25 new destination throughout 2017-2018, including to Canberra in Australia; Chiang Mai in Thailand; Las Vegas and San Francisco in the US; Rio de Janeiro in Brazil; and Santiago in Chile.