How Russia Is Still Flying Sanctioned Boeing and Airbus Jets, Four Years After the Parts Were Cut Off
As of June 2026, Russia's 11 largest airlines operate a Western aircraft fleet of approximately 673 aircraft, almost exclusively Boeing and Airbus models, handling over 90% of the country's passenger traffic. International sanctions imposed after the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine cut off certified spare parts, technical support, and maintenance approval from every major Western supplier. The fleet is still flying. The question of how has a complicated and increasingly documented answer.
The short version: China, India, the UAE, Kyrgyzstan and a network of intermediary trading companies have collectively become the supply chain that Western sanctions were designed to prevent.
The Parts Pipeline Bloomberg Found
China exported at least USD 961 million of aircraft parts to Russia between March 2022 and February 2026, more than quadruple the amount from the equivalent period before the invasion. The mechanism is not simple re-export. Purchase contracts between US suppliers and their international customers explicitly prohibit re-export to Russia. But within two months of engines arriving in India from Western suppliers, intermediary companies resold them to Rossiya Airlines for approximately USD 24 million, parts designed for Airbus A320 aircraft, moving from Western manufacturers through Indian middlemen to one of Russia's largest sanctioned carriers.
The trading companies involved, operating through free-trade zones and industrial parks in the UAE and China, shuffle goods through straw buyers in jurisdictions where enforcement is limited and documentation requirements are flexible. Dozens of shipments of copper wires, bolts, graphite and other Boeing-marked parts reached Aeroflot's warehouses through UAE and Chinese intermediary routes, according to customs data compiled by Import Genius. Export control lawyers consulted on the data noted that many shipments likely violated sanctions, but that Boeing and Airbus were not necessarily at fault, the parts moved through too many layers of intermediaries for the original manufacturers to have visibility into the final destination.
What Happens When the Parts Run Out Anyway
The shadow supply chain is not sufficient to fully replace the authorised maintenance system Russia lost in 2022. The fleet is divided into active and forced-idle components, under intense strain due to restrictions on certified spare parts, technical support, and component lifetime expirations. Aircraft parts are not interchangeable commodities, they have certified service lives, mandatory replacement intervals and traceability requirements that the illicit supply chain cannot fully replicate. A part sourced through a UAE intermediary may be physically identical to an authorised component but lacks the paperwork trail that aviation safety systems require.
Aeroflot has been cannibalising Boeing 737s and 747s from subsidiary carriers, stripping engines and components from grounded aircraft to keep active ones flying. Russia's National Welfare Fund has been financing aircraft transfers within the domestic aviation system. The US Department of Justice has arrested individuals at an Ohio company for exporting USD 2 million in civilian aircraft parts to Russia in circumvention of export laws. the fifth such prosecution in three years. Each arrest represents a node in a supply network that has many more nodes than the ones prosecutors have reached.
The Safety Question Nobody Has a Clean Answer To
GA Telesis previously leased two Airbus A319s and their engines to Rossiya Airlines. After sanctions were imposed, the aircraft remained in Russia without the lessor's consent. In 2022, GA Telesis sued Rossiya and Aeroflot. By 2023, the case settled with compensation paid by Russian insurer NSK Insurance Company. That settlement cleared the legal liability but left the aircraft in Russia, where they remain, flying on parts sourced through channels their original manufacturers cannot inspect or certify.
An aircraft maintained with uncertified parts, by engineers whose training certification the relevant authorities cannot validate, in a country banned from most international airspace, is an aircraft whose safety standards cannot be independently verified. Russia's domestic aviation authority continues to certify its own fleet. No international body recognises those certifications. The passengers onboard are flying on faith that the shadow supply chain has delivered adequately, and that the engineers maintaining the aircraft are doing so correctly without the technical support systems that Boeing and Airbus maintenance programmes require.
The USD 15.6 million Rossiya lawsuit against a parts supplier is one visible surface of a much larger problem. The supply chain underneath it has been moving hundreds of millions of dollars of parts for four years. Whether those parts are keeping Russian aviation safe, or simply keeping it airborne, is a question the sanctions regime was designed to answer and has not fully resolved.
Jishan Khan 
