Our previous “Maintained to Fail” investigation into Aviaremont JSC documented how Russia’s military aviation maintenance backbone is collapsing due to sanctions and absent spare parts. With the ever growing number of military aircraft requiring repairs and overhaul facilities effectively insolvent, the Russian Aerospace Forces are experiencing a genuine airlift capacity crisis – not just a maintenance inconvenience. That crisis leaves a gap. Russia’s military needs to move troops, weapons, and materiel. Its own aircraft increasingly cannot. So it is turning to the next most available option: civilian aviation.
In June 2022, just a few months after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin approved the Comprehensive Programme for the Development of the Air Transport Industry of the Russian Federation until 2030. At its inception, the true scale of the challenges facing Russia’s aviation sector was still far from clear. According to the document obtained by Dallas, the Russian commercial aviation fleet comprised a total of 1,287 aircraft as of April 2022. This inventory consisted of 1,101 passenger aircraft, 84 cargo aircraft, and 42 business jets. Interestingly, this total also bundled in 60 aircraft that are not, in fact, involved in commercial transport operations.
The Quasi-Civilian Vanguard: State Flight Units
Rather, these airframes are operated by various federal state institutions and affiliated enterprises. Specifically, this non-commercial state segment includes:
- The ‘Special Flight Detachment Rossiya’ (under the Administrative Directorate of the President of the Russian Federation);
- The ‘Aviation Rescue Company’ (under the Ministry for Civil Defence, Emergencies and Elimination of Consequences of Natural Disasters);
- The Joint-Stock Company ‘Production Association Kosmos’;
- The ‘State Airline 223rd Flight Unit’ (operated directly by the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation).
Crucially, while the 223rd is explicitly named in this specific registry, it represents only half of the Ministry of Defence’s quasi-civilian apparatus. It operates in tandem with its sister entity, the 224th Flight Unit. Formally a subsidiary of JSC Garnizon – an umbrella corporation directly controlled by the MoD – the 224th was originally spun off from the Russian Air Force’s Military Transport Aviation to provide commercial air cargo transport services.
Why does the Ministry of Defence maintain aircraft on the civilian registry when it already commands a Military Transport Aviation fleet of roughly 400 to 450 dedicated military airframes? Aside from the poor operational readiness of the official fleet, the main strategic hurdle is international access. While Russian military aircraft face no procedural or logistical barriers landing at domestic civilian or joint-use airports within Russia, crossing sovereign borders is an entirely different matter. Under international aviation law, true military aircraft require complex, easily trackable diplomatic clearances to enter foreign airspace and are routinely barred from international commercial hubs. By placing a portion of its fleet on the civil registry and painting them in standard commercial liveries, the Ministry of Defence exploits civil aviation protocols. This allows them to bypass diplomatic red tape and fly into crucial transit nodes like the UAE, Turkey, or various African states under the guise of ‘civilian charter flights’.
The operational reality of these units has thoroughly eroded their commercial veneer. Over the past decade, international monitors and open-source intelligence have consistently tracked aircraft belonging to both the 223rd and 224th Flight Units executing overtly military operations under the guise of civilian charters.
The 223rd Flight Unit, for instance, became widely documented as a primary logistical artery for the Wagner Group, routinely ferrying mercenaries, weaponry, and extracted resources across Syria, Sudan, Mali, and the Central African Republic. This direct material support ultimately triggered an international response; in May 2023, the US Department of the Treasury officially designated the 223rd Flight Unit under sweeping sanctions aimed at dismantling Wagner’s global infrastructure.
The 224th Flight Unit has been implicated in even more high-value military transfers. As Russia sought to replenish its depleted munitions reserves, the 224th acted as a critical conduit for foreign weaponry. In January 2024, the US State Department imposed sanctions against the 224th and its Director General, Vladimir Mikheychik. The official designation explicitly cited the unit’s use of its nominally ‘civilian’ Il-76 freighters to transfer ballistic missiles and related material directly from North Korea to Russian military facilities in late 2023.
Drafting the Private Sector
However, the 223rd and 224th Flight Units represent merely the state-owned vanguard of a much broader shadow logistics network. The Ministry of Defence’s reliance on ostensibly independent, private commercial operators is not a recent stopgap born solely out of wartime desperation; rather, it reflects a deliberate, long-standing strategy to diversify supply lines and outsource sensitive expeditionary tasks. Documented cooperation with purely civilian cargo airlines – most notably JSC Aviacon Zitotrans – long predates the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
To illustrate the mechanics of this integration, Dallas makes public primary documentary evidence detailing specific military operations executed by commercial fleets:
Specifically, Dallas reveals original air waybills confirming the transportation of Russian military helicopters to Laos in November 2020. These documents demonstrate that civilian cargo operators were contracted to execute these international shipments explicitly on the orders of the Russian Ministry of Defence.
An official state exemption from dangerous goods protocols, enabling the transport of missile components in Russian and English
A further documented example of this evasion tactic involves the transport of complete missile systems and independent missile warheads to India at the end of 2022. Because standard international aviation protocols strictly regulate such cargo, these highly sensitive military payloads were escorted by special couriers from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. To execute the flight, the operators utilised a formal state waiver, officially titled an “Exemption from the provisions of the ‘Technical Instructions for the Safe Transport of Dangerous Goods by Air'”.
Risk Assessment Form for Flights to Syria
Another telling example is the “Risk Assessment Form for Flights” of the Aviacon Zitotrans to Syria, commissioned by the Russian Ministry of Defense for the transportation of dangerous goods. The document is dated February 2023. While the specific nature of the ‘dangerous goods’ is not disclosed in the document, the destination (Damascus) and the client (the Russian Ministry of Defence) strongly indicate weapons or munitions transfers.
What the extreme operational tempo of the war in Ukraine has done is massively accelerate this systemic integration. Beyond direct contracting for the military authorities commercial air freight operators like Aviacon Zitotrans are now deeply embedded in the supply chains of heavily sanctioned state enterprises responsible for manufacturing critical military hardware and munitions.
Customs records indicate that Aviacon Zitotrans transferred electronic equipment from Uganda’s Ministry of Defence
Air waybills obtained by Dallas confirm, for instance, that Aviacon Zitotrans facilitated the transportation of military cargo from Russia to China on behalf of key Russian aerospace and defense manufacturers, including the V.V. Chernyshev Moscow Machine-Building Enterprise, UEC-Klimov, and JSC Krasny Oktiabr. Furthermore, documentary evidence reveals the cargo carrier executing sensitive reverse logistics, such as transporting electronic equipment from Uganda back to Russia to supply the Almaz-Antey Aerospace Defense Concern, Russia’s leading developer and manufacturer of surface-to-air and missile defense systems.
Furthermore, Aviacon Zitotrans openly advertises its integration into the Russian military-industrial complex. The company’s own website hosts documentation confirming direct partnerships with heavily sanctioned defence contractors, notably the Ural Optical and Mechanical Plant and Kurganmashzavod, Russia’s leading manufacturer of infantry fighting vehicles.
Aviacon Zitotrans is by no means an isolated case. The Ministry of Defence has cultivated a resilient ecosystem of private operators to compensate for its severe logistical shortfalls. This network includes Abakan Air, sanctioned by the US Treasury in June 2024 for transporting weapons and facilitating PMC operations in Africa. Similarly, the Volga-Dnepr Group pivoted aggressively to domestic military and government contracts after Western airspace bans and asset seizures crippled its global operations. Even smaller operators like Gelix Airlines routinely execute shadow charter flights, with open-source flight tracking frequently exposing their irregular deliveries to joint-use military aerodromes with disabled transponders.
Crucially, this militarisation of civil aviation extends far beyond freight. The Ministry of Defence routinely charters civilian passenger airlines to execute similar ‘dark flights’ – disabling their transponders to slip into closed airspace and joint-use bases (such as Mozdok or Rostov-on-Don) to facilitate rapid troop deployments.
Documented examples include:
I-Fly: Contracted by the MoD to transport conscripted soldiers from Siberia to Rostov-on-Don for onward deployment to the Ukrainian front.
Ural Airlines: Implicated in flying military personnel to closed transit hubs, including Rostov’s Platov and occupied Simferopol, prompting formal charges from Ukrainian intelligence against the airline’s leadership.
The Infrastructure of Shadow Logistics: Dual-Use Aerodromes
The seamless execution of both cargo and passenger ‘dark flights’ relies heavily on Russia’s legally codified network of dual-use infrastructure. According to official Russian government decrees governing joint-basing aerodromes (e.g., Decree No. 1034-r), numerous airfields legally accommodate both state military and commercial civil aviation. This architecture provides perfect logistical camouflage for private operators, primarily clustered around three types of hubs:
- Production and Experimental Hubs (Ulyanovsk-Vostochny & Zhukovsky): Operating nominally as commercial or experimental airfields, these sites house massive defence manufacturing facilities (such as Aviastar-SP) and serve as prime collection points for Rostec military hardware disguised as commercial freight.
- Military-Civil Integration Nodes (Chkalovsky, Migalovo, & Koltsovo): Koltsovo (Yekaterinburg) serves as the primary base for Aviacon Zitotrans, while Migalovo and Chkalovsky are restricted MoD facilities that also service civilian-registered freighters from Gelix Airlines and the 224th Flight Unit.
- Forward Operating Bases (Rostov-Platov, Simferopol, & Machulishchy): Despite being officially closed to civilian traffic since the 2022 invasion, frontline hubs like Platov and occupied Simferopol – alongside Machulishchy Air Base in Belarus – act as the primary offloading zones for civilian aircraft hauling soldiers and heavy weaponry directly to the operational theatre.
An official directive from the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, authorising the civilian cargo operator Aviacon Zitotrans to utilise the restricted Chkalovsky military airfield free of charge
Crucially, the physical geography of these joint-use aerodromes introduces a profound collateral risk. Satellite intelligence and open-source flight monitoring frequently place these chartered transport aircraft on aprons immediately adjacent to active military cantonments, air defence batteries, or tactical aviation regiments. At functional commercial hubs like Koltsovo, one of Russia’s busiest civilian passenger airports, the physical dividing line between the civilian passenger terminal and the military logistics sector is dangerously porous.
By systematically routing high-value military cargo through active civilian airports, the Ministry of Defence effectively exploits commercial infrastructure for operational cover. This deliberate blurring of the legal distinction between protected civilian spaces and active military logistics nodes places ordinary air travellers and commercial ground crews at acute risk of collateral exposure.
Grounding the Shadow Air Fleet
Despite sweeping Western designations, these entities operate with alarming efficacy. The fundamental vulnerability of the current sanctions regime is its limited jurisdictional reach outside Europe and North America. This impunity is starkly highlighted by non-aligned nations willing to ignore unilateral US and European sanctions. Whether it is the UAE and Turkey serving as vital global procurement and transhipment centres, or South Africa permitting sanctioned Russian cargo aircraft to land and refuel, these jurisdictions provide safe transit corridors for Russia’s auxiliary military transport network.
The continued operation of these airlines proves that primary entity designations are no longer sufficient. To effectively disrupt this logistical pipeline, Western policymakers must escalate from targeting the aircraft to systematically sanctioning the foreign infrastructure that keeps them airborne. This requires the aggressive application of secondary sanctions against ground handlers, aviation fuel suppliers, and civil aviation authorities in transit hubs across the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa. Until the physical servicing of these blocked tail numbers becomes a toxic liability globally, the Russian Ministry of Defence will continue to seamlessly exploit commercial aviation as a highly effective military asset.
