Dubai’s budget carrier Flydubai is planning to start flights to Yekaterinburg in Russia on 16 October.

Flydubai will offer two flights a week.

The city which was formerly known as Sverdlovsk is located to the east of the Ural mountains and is the administrative centre of the Sverdlovsh Oblast region.

Today it is a hub for heavy industry and is a stop on the Trans-Siberian railway. Yekaterinburg is also historically famous as being the city in which Tsar Nicholas II and his family were killed by the Bolsheviks in 1918.

Flydubai began flights to Latakia, Istanbul, Colombo and Karachi in June and also began operations to Erbil in Iraq on 16 July (MEED 4:7:10).