The Illusion of Sovereignty: How Sanctions Are Grounding Russia’s Civil Aviation

The numbers illustrate the sheer scale of the vulnerability. Russia has roughly 1,100-1,135 civilian aircraft, with about 1,088 in regular operation. Around two-thirds of the fleet is foreign-made, while Airbus and Boeing aircraft carry approximately 95% of all passenger traffic. On medium- and long-haul routes, the dependence on Western aircraft is effectively total.

That fleet was never designed to be maintained in isolation.

The problem Russia now faces is not simply that spare parts have become harder to obtain. Its entire model of civil aviation depended on access to international manufacturers, certified maintenance networks, software updates, insurance systems and a global regulatory environment. Sanctions have disrupted all of those links. The domestic industry was expected to replace them. It has not.

The replacement programme collapsed under its own promises

Moscow's answer to the sanctions was ambitious. A state programme running to 2030, with a budget of about $12 billion, envisaged the production of 994 civilian aircraft and 765 helicopters.

The gap between the plan and reality is now difficult to disguise.

More than 120 new aircraft were supposed to be produced between 2022 and 2025. In practice, only 13 were delivered, and just seven operational Superjet 100s were built by the United Aircraft Corporation over three years. Even the Superjet remains dependent on Western components.

The failure is particularly damaging because the programme was not merely an industrial project. It was supposed to provide the technological foundation for what the Kremlin repeatedly presents as aviation sovereignty.

Instead, Russia is discovering that sovereignty cannot be declared into existence.

The MC-21 has encountered technical and engine problems, forcing its planned capacity down from 210 seats to 163 and requiring redesign and renewed certification. The Superjet programme has been delayed by difficulties with the PD-8 engine. Production plans for the Tu-214 have been cut sharply because manufacturing capacity remains too limited. The Il-96-400M programme, which envisaged 14 aircraft, has effectively been abandoned as a commercial solution.

The contrast is stark: a programme designed to produce nearly 1,000 aircraft has run into the reality that Russia's nominal industrial capacity is only around 26 aircraft per year.

That is not a temporary production bottleneck. It is an industrial problem.

The fleet is being kept alive through improvisation

The most revealing feature of the crisis is what happens when a modern aviation system loses access to the ecosystem that keeps it functioning.

Russian airlines are increasingly forced to maintain Western aircraft without original parts, certified servicing or regular software support. Some components are manufactured domestically, sometimes from materials that do not meet original specifications. Others arrive through third countries and opaque supply chains.

Then there is the practice commonly described as aviation cannibalisation: aircraft are dismantled so that their components can keep other planes flying.

The scale matters. Reports of fully equipped or relatively new aircraft being stripped for parts indicate that the issue is no longer an emergency measure used occasionally to keep a fleet operational. It is becoming part of the system itself.

An aircraft can continue flying after a manufacturer stops supporting it. It cannot do so indefinitely without a reliable chain of inspection, replacement, certification and technical expertise.

That distinction is where the real danger lies.

Russia may be able to keep a certain number of aircraft in the air by sacrificing others. But the process gradually reduces the total fleet while making the remaining aircraft increasingly dependent on non-standard solutions. The result is not simply fewer planes. It is a system with less redundancy, fewer reserves and less room for technical failure.

The international aviation system is built around precisely the opposite principle.

The sanctions problem is also a certification problem

One of the least visible consequences of isolation is the loss of institutional legitimacy.

A spare part is not merely a physical object. In modern aviation, its origin, material composition, manufacturing process, inspection history and installation all form part of a chain of certification. The same is true of maintenance work and software.

Russia's aviation sector is increasingly operating outside that chain.

The country also faces a legal problem created by its seizure of hundreds of foreign-leased aircraft after the invasion. Internationally, many of these planes remain tied to disputes over ownership and leasing. For Russian airlines, operating them abroad creates the risk of arrest. According to the material available, only around 400 foreign aircraft and fewer than 150 Russian or Soviet-built aircraft can be used internationally without that risk.

Moscow's response is expected to include the use of nominal leasing companies and other intermediaries designed to obscure ownership structures.

But a legal workaround cannot solve a technological shortage.

A shell company can make an aircraft easier to move across a border. It cannot manufacture a certified engine component or restore access to a manufacturer's software.

Why the Soviet solution is returning

The next stage of the crisis is likely to be most visible outside Moscow and other major cities.

Russia is already preparing to bring back aircraft that belong to a different technological era. Some Soviet-built planes are 40 to 60 years old. The list includes the An-2, the famous aircraft that once served as the backbone of regional aviation across the Soviet Union.

This is more than nostalgia.

The An-2 and other aircraft developed by Ukraine's Antonov design bureau played a crucial role in connecting remote areas of the Soviet Union and later Russia. The An-24 and An-26 were designed for the realities of regional aviation, including difficult airfields and infrastructure far below the standards of major international airports.

Replacing them has proved far more complicated than Moscow's political language suggested.

The LMS-901 Baikal cannot operate from unpaved runways in the way its predecessors did. The Il-114-300 has propellers positioned low enough to create a serious risk of damage on poorly prepared surfaces. A new aircraft may therefore exist on paper while remaining unsuitable for the geography and infrastructure it is meant to serve.

This is the central contradiction of Russian aviation policy: the country needs modern aircraft to replace old ones, but the new aircraft are often designed for infrastructure that many of the regions requiring them do not possess.

Meanwhile, 158 airfields - nearly two-thirds of the total - are reportedly operating with safety violations, while another 134 require reconstruction or major repairs.

The aircraft crisis and the airport crisis are therefore reinforcing each other.

The price of keeping the map connected

For Russia, civil aviation is not merely a consumer service. In a country of enormous distances, it is part of the basic architecture of the state.

The loss of reliable regional air links would hit Siberia and the Far East particularly hard. In many areas, aviation is not a convenient alternative to rail or road transport. It is the only practical connection to the rest of the country.

That means the deterioration of the fleet could have consequences far beyond airline balance sheets.

Routes will become more expensive to operate. Aircraft will become scarcer. Maintenance costs will rise. Passengers will face higher prices and fewer connections. Remote regions will become more isolated, while the state will have to choose which routes receive support and which are allowed to disappear.

The crisis could also expose a wider economic contradiction. Russia has managed to preserve the appearance of a functioning aviation market because the fleet inherited from the pre-sanctions era was large enough to provide time.

That time is now running out.

The aircraft were the accumulated capital of an earlier period of global integration. Sanctions did not destroy the fleet overnight. They interrupted the mechanisms that replenished and maintained it. The consequences therefore emerge with a delay - first as missing parts, then as grounded aircraft, then as shrinking production and finally as a shortage of planes.

This is why the crisis has reached a critical point in 2025–2026 rather than immediately after the invasion.

The buffer is being consumed.

The beneficiaries are outside Russia

The collapse of Russia's aviation independence is also creating opportunities elsewhere.

Airlines and transit hubs in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and China can gain leverage on international routes that Russian carriers cannot safely operate with aircraft vulnerable to seizure. Passengers who still need to travel internationally increasingly depend on alternative hubs.

Chinese suppliers and intermediary companies involved in the movement of spare parts can also profit from the opaque supply chains created by sanctions.

But those arrangements do not recreate the old system. They replace a transparent industrial relationship with a chain of intermediaries, mark-ups and uncertainty.

For Russian airlines, the cost is paid through reduced efficiency and declining access to global markets. For passengers, it appears as higher fares and fewer options.

For the aircraft industry, the damage is more fundamental. Once an industrial sector loses access to modern materials, software, engines, certification expertise and international customers, rebuilding it becomes far harder than simply restarting a factory.

A country can maintain aircraft without maintaining aviation

The most important question is not whether Russia can keep some Boeing and Airbus aircraft flying for another few years. It probably can.

The question is what kind of aviation system will remain when the current stock of aircraft, spare parts and technical expertise has been exhausted.

A fleet can be extended beyond its original service life. A component can be sourced through a third country. One aircraft can be dismantled to keep another in service. A state agency can approve a longer operating period.

None of these measures restores the system that made modern aviation reliable.

They consume the future to preserve the present.

Russia's civil aviation crisis therefore, reveals a broader failure in the country's technological strategy. The state promised import substitution, but received a shrinking fleet, delayed aircraft, cancelled programs, and a return to Soviet-era platforms. It promised sovereignty and became more dependent on informal foreign supply chains. It promised industrial renewal while its production capacity remained far below the scale required.

The most consequential shift may not be the moment when the next aircraft is grounded. It is the gradual transformation of civil aviation from a globally integrated, certified industry into a closed system that survives by extending, dismantling and improvising.

For a country as large as Russia, the final cost of that transformation may be measured not only in aircraft.