Russian military aviation is facing a crisis that is described in documents of none other than "Aviaremont" JSC - the main conglomerate for the maintenance and repair of military aircraft in Russia, operating under the auspices of the state corporation "Rostec" and its subsidiary "United Aircraft Corporation". "Aviaremont" is of fundamental importance for maintaining the entire air fleet of the Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) operational and combat-ready. This is what Dallas Analytics writes.
Documents obtained by Dallas - including materials dating back as far as December 2025 - point to an accelerating decline in the industry, most clearly visible in the deteriorating operational experience of the Kiev-designed "Antonov An" series - Soviet-era aircraft that Russia can no longer produce, replace or maintain without access to Ukrainian supply chains, which Western sanctions have systematically targeted. The roots of this dependency date back more than a decade. When Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, its entire framework for cooperation with "Antonov" collapsed overnight. Moscow simultaneously lost access to Ukrainian design expertise, spare parts and the production chain. No new Antonov aircraft have been produced anywhere since 2016, leaving Russia with an aging fleet that it can barely operate but never replace.
This was also evident in the December 2025 incident, when an An-22 - Russia's most capable strategic military aircraft - broke up in mid-air and plunged into a tank in the Ivanovo region during a test flight after a scheduled repair, killing all seven crew members on board. The Russian Investigative Committee has opened a criminal case for possible violations of flight preparation rules. The crash occurred in the same city - Ivanovo - that houses 308 ARZ (308 Aviaremontny Zavod), the main facility responsible for repairing the An-series. The plant quickly denied any involvement, stating that the plane had last passed through its workshops in 2007.
This claim has not been proven. Dallas has obtained a document indicating that 308 ARZ had actually carried out repair work on this particular plane as recently as August 2025 - just four months before the incident.
That incident did not receive much public attention, but the next one was harder to ignore - on March 31, 2026, an An-26 military transport plane crashed during a routine flight over Crimea, killing all 29 people on board - among them Lieutenant General Alexander Otroshchenko, commander of the Northern Fleet's Mixed Aviation Corps and one of Russia's most decorated military pilots.
An official position from the Ministry of Defense states that "there was no external impact on the plane. The preliminary cause of the crash was a technical malfunction.
Internal documents show that the technical malfunction was not an isolated incident, but the foreseeable result of a maintenance infrastructure that Russian authorities have personally acknowledged is no longer fit for purpose - emptied by the war with Ukraine, subject to Western sanctions and poorly managed by a chain of command that leads directly to the Kremlin.
Among the Aviaremont documents Dallas reviewed was a report submitted by Director General Albert Bakov to Rostec CEO Sergei Chemezov. Entitled "SVC Report 12/30/2025" - SVC being Chemezov's initials in Russian - the document concerns the operational status of 308 ARZ, the wholly owned subsidiary of Aviaremont. in Ivanovo and the main Russian repair facility for the Antonov An-series (An-22, An-26, An-30 and An-72).
At the end of December 2025, Bakov clearly stated that the 308th ARZ is unable to carry out repairs of An-series aircraft for the following reasons: import substitution for key components has not been implemented, a full set of design documentation is missing, and there is no domestic production of spare parts in Russia.
He also noted that the Ministry of Defense has not fulfilled the detailed maintenance schedules for the An-series aircraft fleet approved by the Minister of Defense in 2023. A new program to address the shortage, currently being developed at the "V. M. Myasishchev" Experimental Machine-Building Plant, envisages that funding - approximately $300 million - will begin only from 2029.
Meanwhile, 14 aircraft at 308 ARZ are undergoing major repairs under a state defense order. Advance payments received under state contracts have already been spent in full. According to Bakov's report, it is no longer possible to continue the repairs. 308 ARZ has no alternative source of income and is facing the threat of bankruptcy - a remarkable admission for a facility of strategic importance. In a functioning defense institution, this would have led to emergency intervention. In Russia, run by "Rostec", this led to the granting of a loan.
The unpaid salaries were settled with funds borrowed from RT-Capital, a subsidiary of "Rostec" that specializes in the management and disposal of troubled assets. The remaining funds were sufficient to pay off employees' advances as of January 25, 2026.
The choice of the person to whom "Rostec" entrusted the management of "Aviaremont" is indicative in itself. Albert Bakov took over the management of this strategic asset in October 2022 - without any relevant aviation experience. By education, he is an economist specializing in Japan, graduated from the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Moscow State University. Before arriving at "Aviaremont", he was successively the head of the concern "Tractor Plants", "Kurganmashzavod" and JSC "Central Research Institute of Precision Machine Building" (TsNIITochmash) - defense enterprises that have nothing to do with aviation, but each of which faced acute financial difficulties during his tenure. The logic of his appointment is explained not by his experience, but by personal connections: Bakov is the son-in-law of Nikita Mikhalkov, the director who is in the Kremlin's inner circle, and a close associate of the deputy general director of Rostec, Igor Zavyalov.
The scale of the aircraft repair problem extends far beyond a single plant. A second internal document - a letter sent by Bakov to the deputy general director of Rostec, Alexander Nazarov, in August 2025 - reveals that Russia currently operates approximately 368 An-series aircraft (An-12, An-26, An-72) belonging to the Ministry of Defense, the National Guard and the FSB aviation department, of which 143 are in need of repair. The Ministry of Industry and Trade officially confirmed to Aviaremont the lack of local production of parts, assemblies and components for An-series aircraft, which makes it impossible to fulfill repair contracts within the established deadlines.
The third document of "Aviaremont", dated May 2025, is the most direct of all. According to the document, if urgent measures are not taken, it will be impossible to repair An-series aircraft within 18 to 24 months - and their operation will be completely discontinued.
Taken together, the documents leave little room for interpretation. Russia operates 368 An-series military aircraft - irreplaceable, increasingly unusable and dependent on a repair center that its own director general has declared insolvent. The number of crashes involving An-class aircraft will rise dramatically, according to a forecast by Russian aviation experts cited in an official report among the documents.
The risks extend beyond military aviation. The civilian population of Siberia and the Russian Far East - where An-26 and An-24 aircraft remain the main means of air transport for remote communities - faces the same deteriorating fleet and the same lacking maintenance infrastructure. For them, as for the 29 people aboard the flight over Crimea on March 31, the question is not whether technical failures will become routine, but how many more will be needed before Russia is forced to confront a crisis that its own officials have already documented in detail.
These documents - about the state of the aviation sector - show that Western sanctions are working. Unlike financial metrics that Moscow can manipulate or conceal, planes either fly or they don’t.
Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service predicts that the country will lose nearly half of its civilian fleet by 2030. The critical caveat, however, is consistency. Russia has demonstrated a consistent ability to circumvent sanctions through third-party intermediaries, and gaps in their enforcement in Western jurisdictions continue to blunt the cumulative effect.
The lesson of the Anne series fiasco is not that sanctions alone end wars, but that when precisely designed, resolutely maintained, and synchronized across allied jurisdictions, they change the arithmetic of a war that Russia’s own leadership has personally acknowledged can no longer be sustained.