I’ve noticed there aren’t (m)any flights overflying Ukraine, for obvious reasons.
However, last night (5 January) I noticed British Airways flight #32 (BA32), a daily (or every other day) Hong Kong to London flight, make a dogleg from the Black Sea coast of Turkey straight north to the middle of the Crimean peninsula before turning west again toward London. It also did this on January 3. The aircraft is a Boeing 787.
Also, according to the graph below the map, its speed decreased from about 500mph down to only 62mph during its sojourn toward and over Crimea, without losing altitude, before increasing again to about 500mph upon turning west toward London.
It’s not possible for an airliner to maintain 35k altitude while reducing speed to only 62mph, yet this is what the graph shows.
These are night time flights, so the passengers are probably not aware that they are overflying a war zone during part of their flight.
2 reasons for that, one being the absence of adsb recievers in that area and the ban on overflying the area for European airlines.
So measurements are absent and the trajectory looks like a guessed route and not the actual flown route.
The other is indeed the airspeed, no way a 787 would remain airborne with that airspeed.
So in my humble opinion these tracks are bogus on both days and not what happened in real life .
That’s pretty much what I would like to think, also mainly because of the unlikely airspeed.
Today’s flight is already airborne, although still over China, or maybe Kazakhstan by now. I’ll check on that again later.
Could be GNSS spoofing, which is widespread in the area; most ADS-B transponders are only using GNSS as a position source regardless of the nav source the pilots are using.
You can check other sites light Flightradar, they are only showing the estimated flight path, because none of the ADS-B receivers got the signal during that time.
You can see this pretty often in this or other areas.
