Cyber specialists of the Ukrainian intelligence got access to the closed official documents of the structural unit of the Ministry of Transport of the Russian Federation — the Federal Air Transport Agency, known as "Rosaviatsia".
This was reported in the press service of the Main Directorate of Intelligence (MDI, also known as GUR).
Here is what Ukrainian intelligence officers managed to find out:
- During January 2023, 185 air accidents involving Russian civil aviation were recorded. About a third are classified as incidents of various levels of danger. The Russian short-haul aircraft Sukhoi superjet became the leader here — there were 34 problem cases with it.
- In the first 9 months of 2023, 150 cases of aircraft technical malfunctions were documented in Russia. For the same period in 2022, 50 such incidents were recorded. So, flying in Russia has become three times more dangerous.
- The most problematic areas of Russian aviation remain engines and chassis, as well as other important elements: hydraulic systems, flaps and software.
- Russia has serious difficulties in maintaining high-flying aircraft. Due to the lack of capacity and specialists in the country, the Russians are trying to maintain aircraft in Iran — they do it there without the appropriate certification.
- As of March 2022, the Russians had approximately 820 foreign-made civilian aircraft. At that time, only up to 10% of them went through non-certified repairs using non-original spare parts. And now almost 70% of the aircraft fleet has been driven away through such a "service".
- Due to the acute shortage of spare parts in Russia, some planes are dismantled to repair others. By the middle of 2023, more than 35% of aircraft in the Russian Federation were allowed to be "donated".
- Most of the Soviet An-2 planes do not fly now, because the engines for them were produced in Poland, and because of sanctions, the Russians cannot get them.
- During January 2023 alone, 220 Airbus aircraft in Russia had 19 different failures. Thus, 17 cases of smoke were recorded in 9 planes used by Aeroflot.
- 33 technical failures of various Boeing aircraft systems were recorded. In total, there are 230 of them in Russia.
- Every seventh Brazilian Embraer in Russia is broken, and there are 21 of them in the Russian Federation.
All this is a direct consequence of the sanctions that Russia is trying to hide, exposing its population to mortal danger, as GUR summarized.
- After the invasion of Russian troops into Ukraine on February 24, the European Union closed the skies for Russian aircraft, prohibited the supply of spare parts for them, maintenance, support and insurance, and also obliged leasing companies to return aircraft that were leased from Russian carriers. The USA also imposed sanctions on the aviation sector of the Russian Federation.
- In July, it became known that Russian airlines refuse to return 435 aircraft and aircraft spare parts that they leased from foreign companies. These planes are worth billions of dollars, so the leasing companies have already filed insurance claims for a total of $10 billion.
- Reuters, citing sources, wrote that Russian airlines, including the state-owned “Aeroflot”, are dismantling planes to get spare parts that they can no longer buy abroad due to Western sanctions.