(NewsNation Now) — Planes from around the world are flying in a wide circle around the airspace above the Ukraine-Russia border, leaving a large, empty circle in the middle of Eastern Europe. 

A live map from FlightAware, a flight-tracking and data platform, shows zero planes over Ukraine, and few flights over neighboring Poland, Belarus, Slovakia, Moldova and the western portion of Russia. This map does not track military flights.

Ukraine officially closed its airspace to civilian flights Thursday morning, although some airlines had already begun canceling flights to the Eastern European country earlier as tensions mounted. 

On many people’s minds is Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, which was shot from the sky over war-torn Ukraine in 2014 by a Russian-made missile. Russia and Russian separatists in Ukraine both denied the act, which killed 298 people.

The European Union Aviation Safety Agency, or EASA, warned, “The presence and possible use of a wide range of ground and airborne warfare systems poses a HIGH risk for civil flights operating at all altitudes and flight levels.”

Meanwhile, Cold War-era travel lines are being drawn. Russia on Friday banned all British airlines from landing at their airports, in retaliation for a similar ban by Britain. 

The FAA banned U.S. airlines and pilots from operating in all of Ukraine, Belarus and parts of western Russia. And Anchorage Airport in Alaska has been getting inquiries about its capacity, “harking back to Cold War days when it was a popular refueling hub for jets barred from Soviet airspace,” Reuters reported.

In Ukraine, Russia’s military reported on Friday it seized a strategic international airport outside Kyiv, allowing it to quickly build up forces to take the capital. The country also claimed to have already cut the city off from the west — the direction taken by many of those escaping the invasion, leading to lines of cars snaking toward the Polish border.