The Problem of Assessing Russia's Economic Capacity to Wage War Under Sanctions. Part 6
The Monitoring Group of BlackSeaNews
and the Black Sea Institute of Strategic Studies
presents Part 6 of the Report on European security risks and forecasts as of late 2024 – early 2025, based on the monitoring results of the Black Sea Institute of Strategic Studies, Ukraine.
European Security Risks and Forecasts as of Early 2025. Part 1
Ways to Reduce Russia's Revenues from Seaborne Crude Oil and Petroleum Products Exports. Part 2
Russia's Ways of Raising the World Oil Prices. Part 3
Russia is developing a new strategy to increase security risks in the Black Sea in response to the defeat of the Black Sea Fleet. Part 4
Ukrainian Black Sea Corridor as Russia's Key Military Target. Part 5
* * *
In recent months, several Russian “opposition” economists, who left for the West after the outbreak of the full-scale war, have published their research findings. Various studies on the topic have also appeared in Europe and the United States. They attempt to prove that the Russian economy is quite stable, has adapted to the sanctions regime, and will withstand many more years of war against Ukraine without any significant problems other than a growing technological lag.
However, those extremely important political conclusions are made on the basis of the Russian official statistics and with the use of classical methods of peacetime economic and social analysis under the conditions of deliberate disinformation campaigns waged by Russia, which are intended to lead to such conclusions.
At the same time, our experience of monitoring Russia shows that the real state of the Russian economy under the unprecedented sanctions regime may be quite different.
In wartime, when the traditional economic indicators are either deliberately distorted or simply unavailable, it is the indirect ones that acquire the most crucial role, lifting the veil on the real state of affairs. And this is precisely the goal of the BSISS monitoring that often produces results leading to completely different conclusions.
For instance, as has already been mentioned, our monitoring of the weapons used in Russia’s attacks against Ukraine has indicated the shortage of Kalibr cruise missiles. Along with the massive use of North Korean shells and missiles, that is a very telling indicator of the state of the Russian economy and military industry.
Similarly, our monitoring of incidents in Russian civil aviation has become yet another important indicator of the state of the Russian economy under large-scale sanctions.
Note that the BSISS conclusions had been drawn, but not yet published, a few days prior to the recent crash of the Russian Sukhoi Superjet at Antalya Airport, Turkey.
While monitoring the activities of 38 Russian airlines from 1 June to 1 November 2024, we recorded 454 cases of technical problems during passenger transportation. More than 80% of all Russian passenger air transportation is carried out by aircraft manufactured in Western countries. According to the monitoring, the average incident rate for passenger air transportation over 5 months was 56 cases per 298 aircraft, or 18.8%, for Airbus; 68 cases per 236 aircraft, or 28.8%, for Boeing; and 144 cases per 157 aircraft, or 91.7%, for Sukhoi Superjet.
Importantly, the majority of the problems of all aircraft were with critical aircraft components, namely engines and computer and navigation systems, which neither Russia nor its current geopolitical partners produce or will be capable of producing in the foreseeable future.
This was just one practical example. In general, assessing Russia's economic capacity to continue the war under sanctions is a difficult task, as Russia has banned publication of key statistical indicators. Given the intelligence background of Russia's leaders and their professional habits, it is likely that even the indicators that continue to be officially published are completely falsified.
Under those conditions, such classical economic health indicators as GDP, inflation, and exchange rate completely lose their value, thus making any analysis of the Russian economy based on official sources almost entirely useless. Therefore, we now need to create a completely new methodology for assessing the economic situation in Russia, which remains a major threat to the West.
We believe it is necessary for researchers to base their analysis on the following premise, which certainly requires non-standard approaches.
Russia's regime is based on revenues from energy exports to the East and South and on the use of Western technologies or their analogues of increasingly poor quality that have been purchased bypassing sanctions with revenues from those exports. Such an economy inevitably ceases to be a market one, loses its ability to adapt to sanctions, and can be neither self-sufficient nor sustainable – its sustainability is merely Putin's bluff. Calling and countering that bluff is a serious challenge for the modern civilized world.
The Overview of the Russian Passenger Air Fleet Technical Failures Based on the Daily Monitoring for the Period from 1 June to 1 November 2024
I. The Composition of the Russian Federation's Passenger Air Fleet
Even though with the beginning of Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine in 2022, the aggressor country stopped publishing any official statistics on its passenger air transportation, based on the 2021 data, we can assume that as of today, Russian passenger air fleet numbers about 7,000 aircraft, of which about 700 are high-capacity airliners. The rest is represented by single-engine airplanes, helicopters and other aircraft that mainly meet the local transportation needs.
Overall, more than 80% of all Russian passenger air traffic is carried by foreign-made airplanes. The most common high-capacity aircraft types in Russia are:
- Airbus (A300-A350) – 298 planes,
- Boeing (B737-800) – 236 planes,
- Sukhoi Superjet 100/SSJ100 (SSJ100-75-SSJ100R, SBJ) – 157 planes.
Figure 1 shows the fleet structure of the largest Russian airlines by aircraft origin/manufacturer.
The age composition of the fleet is extremely uneven: according to 2021 statistics, most aircraft, 55%, have been in operation for over 30 years, 15% – for 15-30 years, and only 13% – for fewer than 15 years, of which the number of aircraft manufactured in the last five years is fewer than 2%.
The fleet composition in terms of flight range is also heterogeneous. Long-haul aircraft, for flights over 6,000 km, include double-deck wide-body Boeing 747 and A380, as well as single-deck wide-body A300, A310, A330, A340, A350, Boeing 767, 777 and Boeing 787 Dreamliner, IL-86 and IL-96. The most common medium-haul aircraft – 2,500 to 6,000 km flights – are Boeing 737 and 757, the European A320 and the Soviet/Russian Tu-154 and Tu-204/214. Short-haul aircraft such as Sukhoi Superjet 100 (SSJ), IL-114, An-24, and An-26 operate at distances from 1,000 to 2,500 km. A separate category is made up of local aircraft – fewer than 1,000 km flights – represented by Cessna, Beechcraft, and various modifications of An-2.
It should be taken in account that for a country of Russia's size, domestic air transportation is the basis of interregional population mobility: before the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the country's domestic civil aviation carried up to 87.5 million passengers annually. And at travel distances of more than 1,800 km, air transport plays not just a dominant, but often an indispensable role.
II. The Number and Distribution of Air Incidents
According to our estimates, in 2023 and 2024, Russian airlines operated approximately 60,000 passenger flights monthly, or 63.8% of the corresponding 2021 volume (94,000). Thus, during the period of our monitoring from 1 June to 1 November 2024, which covered the activity of 38 Russian airlines, aircraft of the Russian Emergencies Ministry, and of aviation colleges and universities, those made a total of 300,000 passenger flights.
Over those five months, we recorded 454 cases of technical failures that Russian aircraft encountered at the time of passenger transportation, or 0.15% of the total number of flights. Note that the monitoring did not take into account aviation incidents clearly related to the human factor, weather conditions, and natural obstacles. In terms of purely technical problems, it didn't consider incidents of windshield cracking, minor physical damage to the aircraft as a result of collision with other objects, or negligible short-term software bugs.
The most common types of breakdowns we have recorded were issues with engines, navigation, hydraulic and computer systems, landing gear, wing mechanization, fuel leakage, autopilot, and other technical failures. The category of other technical failures includes breakdowns that were reported simply as a “technical malfunction” with no further details.
As can be seen in Figure 2, except for the umbrella category other technical failures, the most numerous problems were with engines – 87 cases (19.2%), computer systems – 61 (13.4%), and landing gear – 48 (10.6%), while the rarest – 12 (2.6%) – with autopilot.
Figure 2 shows the performance of all 10 types of aircraft – represented in various modifications by more than 50 models – covered by the monitoring.
Our further analysis, however, will focus on the performance of the three most popular planes mentioned above, namely Boeing, Airbus, and SSJ, which carry the lion's share of passenger traffic in the Russian Federation.
The distribution of Airbus incidents (see Figure 3), totalling 56, largely follows the overall pattern – except for the other technical failures. The most frequent Airbus incidents were with engines, computer systems, and landing gear while the least frequent ones were with autopilot.
Figure 4 shows that for Boeing (with 68 incidents in total), engine issues ranked first (17.6%), followed by those with the navigation system (13.2%), and landing gear (11.8%).
The undisputed “champion” of our overview by a wide margin, both in terms of the total number of failures and almost each type thereof, is Russian Sukhoi Superjet. The 144 incidents that occurred with those aircraft account for almost a third – 32% – of all Russian civil aviation incidents recorded over the five months. Given that according to the 2021 data, there are 157 such aircraft in the Russian Federation – almost half as many as Airbus and 33% fewer than Boeing – each of them, thus, accounts for almost 1 (0.91%) accident. Under the current conditions of the inability to purchase Western aircraft and Russia's priority financing of military rather than civilian aviation, that may be an indication that the intensity of SSJ usage for passenger transportation has considerably increased.
Figure 5 shows the structure of the Superjet 100 technical problems. While like for the other two aircraft, engine (19.4%) and landing gear (13.2%) issues were among the key ones, computer system failures took the lead among all the incidents (21.5%).
So, it is probably not surprising that one of the two plane crashes recorded over the monitoring period, and the only one with fatalities, occurred with Sukhoi Superjet. On 12 July 2024, a Gazpromavia-owned SSJ100 crashed just 7 minutes after take-off, killing all three crew members on board.
According to the investigation, the accident was caused by the angle of attack (AOA) sensor – a part of the navigation system – malfunctioning. Notably, it was the first flight of that aircraft after the two-month-long repair.
For reference: despite the fact that SSJ100 is a Russian-made aircraft, 70% of its components are imported, including such unique ones as the Franco-Russian PowerJet SaM146 engine. As for the Airbus airplanes, some of them, such as the A321neo, are fitted with American Pratt & Whitney engines that have their own peculiarities and require special maintenance.
In summary, the average accident rate for passenger air transportation (see Figure 7) was as follows:
Airbus – 56 per 298 aircraft, or 18.8%,
- Boeing – 68 per 236 aircraft, or 28.8%,
- SSJ – 144 per 157 aircraft, or 91.7%
Most of the issues for all aircraft were those with the most critical and, at the same time, most difficult to manufacture components, namely engines and computer and navigation systems.
Despite the Airbus and Boeing relatively better performance, the problems of Russian civil aviation with maintaining them airworthy are also evident. The case of a snap inspection by the Russian Federal Air Transport Agency (FAVT) of the Russian air carrier Smartavia, whose fleet includes 13 passenger aircraft, of which 11 are Boeing 737-700 and -800, and 2 – A320neo, is very telling, as the results were nothing short of devastating. In particular, it found that the aircraft were regularly used for an extended period of time beyond the mandatory final repair deadlines; fitted with components lacking permits, often banned by the FAA and not on the list of the Rosaviation (FATA) approved suppliers; that maintenance techniques were grossly violated, from the application of epoxy material to the failure to install bolts; and that the required number of engineering and technical staff had been drastically reduced.
The shortage of qualified technical staff currently seems to be no less of a problem for Russian airlines than the lack of parts. Over the course of the monitoring, we regularly encountered evidence of the low qualification levels of pilots, aircraft mechanics, technicians, and other personnel. Remarkably, the attitudes to maintaining the planes' airworthiness, and consequently, to the quality of training at the country's civil aviation colleges and universities if differs from those of commercial airlines, then only for the worse. For instance, in the summer of 2024, it turned out that due to limited resources, the Krasnokutsk Flight School – a branch of the Ulyanovsk Civil Aviation Institute, subordinate to FATA – had regularly failed to replace the required components in a timely manner. As a result, 18 Cessna-172S training aircraft kept flying with fuel hoses that expired in 2019-2021, while some of them operated with expired electric fuel pumps, oil pressure switches, and carbon monoxide detectors. Miraculously, despite the above, all of the planes had successfully passed annual mandatory inspections by the regional FATA (MTU), which indicates that Russian aviation authorities often deliberately turn a blind eye to technical problems, the solution of which under sanctions requires both ingenuity and significant costs.
At the same time, Russian aviation problems should not be exaggerated either. First of all, more than 80% of all accidents we have recorded are relatively minor, i.e., did not result in fatalities, significant damage to aircraft or facilities, or even the suspension of aircraft from flight.
Secondly, although for obvious reasons, the last three years have become a challenge for Russian civil aviation, as reflected, among other things, in our monitoring statistics, there is no doubt that Russia is actively seeking solutions to these problems and sometimes finds them, albeit not ideal ones.
So, the situation, which is difficult but not catastrophic now, may somewhat improve in 2025-2026. And that may happen not only due to the industry's attempts to increase its efficiency, the promise of which remains controversial, but also due to official purchases of American and European parts from Saudi Arabia, China, and Turkey and unofficial ones through front companies in countries ranging from Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, and Brazil to EU members the Czech Republic and Lithuania.
At the moment, Russia is actively exploring the ways of establishing systemic cooperation with friendly countries both in the area of purchasing the parts and of outsourcing its airplane repair. So far, Russia's main partner in the latter has been Iran, where in the 2010s, taking advantage of the easing of sanctions, Airbus built a modern aircraft maintenance facility for Mahan Air that specializes in the A300, A310, A330, and A340 family of wide-body aircraft. That, however, is not without its problems. Although Iran has more experience than Russia in overhauling landing gear, and in principle could settle that issue for Russian aviation, it simply lacks the qualification for repairing engines and even more so navigation and computer systems. Besides, Iran experiences a significant shortage of parts even for its own air fleet because of sanctions. That is why repairing a Russian aircraft takes Iran an extremely long time, even by Russian standards. But the main problem for Russia in Iran is that the Iranian civilian air fleet is almost twice as old as the Russian one – 28 years vs. 15, respectively, meaning that Iran simply has no expertise or experience in operating and repairing modern aircraft. Therefore, such large Russian airlines as Aeroflot, whose average aircraft age is 10 years, are now particularly vulnerable, since their electronic components and control units require regular updates and upgrades, which Iran can't help with at all. Alternative prospective sources of both the parts, particularly engines, and repair expertise for Russia may include Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
Another attempt to solve the problem systemically is the option of cabotage transportation, currently being considered by the Russian government, i.e., inviting aircraft and crews from other countries to carry out both Russian domestic and international flights. According to open sources, as of the end of October 2024, negotiations on this issue were ongoing with Kazakhstan, which already transports Russians to Cambodia and Vietnam on charter flights.
At the same time, many Russian civil aviation experts consider the cabotage solution impractical, suggesting instead the establishment of a special agency or leasing company for acquiring foreign airplanes on the secondary market, i.e., used, as they believe that at least for the near future, Russia simply has no alternative to purchasing foreign-made aircraft.
* * *
The publication has been created with the support of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation(FES). The position of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the authors.
More on the topic
- 21.01.2025 Ukrainian Black Sea Corridor as Russia's Key Military Target. Part 5
- 17.01.2025 Russia is developing a new strategy to increase security risks in the Black Sea in response to the defeat of the Black Sea Fleet. Part 4
- 15.01.2025 Russia's Ways of Raising the World Oil Prices. Part 3
- 31.12.2024 Ways to Reduce Russia's Revenues from Seaborne Crude Oil and Petroleum Products Exports. Part 2
- 18.12.2024 European Security Risks and Forecasts as of Early 2025. Part 1
- 15.10.2024 Russian Baltic Sea Ports Petroleum Products Imports to the EU Embargo: Database of September 2024 Violations
- 15.10.2024 Russian Crude Oil Imports to the EU Embargo Through the Russian Baltic Sea Ports: Database of September 2024 Violations
- 14.10.2024 99 Tankers Exported Crude Oil from Russian Baltic Sea Ports in September 2024: Database
- 14.10.2024 Maritime Exports of Russian Petroleum Products Through its Baltic Sea Ports: September 2024 Database
- 11.10.2024 Russian Black Sea Ports Oil Product Imports to the EU Embargo: Database of September 2024 Violations
- 11.10.2024 Russian Crude Oil Imports to the EU Embargo: Database of September 2024 Violations
- 10.10.2024 40 Tankers Exported Kazakh Oil from Russian Black Sea Port of Novorossiysk In September 2024: Database