In the late afternoon of March 4, a special plane lands at Saint Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport. It is exactly 5:09 p.m. when the Ilyushin-type machine IL-96-300PU on the runway of the airport. On this day, the world is looking with great concern to Zaporizhia, where the battle is on for Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. A building in the plant goes up in flames after being shelled, and Russian troops take control of the six reactors. The Russian war of aggression is already eight days old and sanctions have been imposed. The EU and the United States have even sanctioned Vladimir Putin himself, along with his key ministers.
It is quite possible that one of these sanctioned persons or even Putin himself will arrive at St. Petersburg airport that afternoon. Because the Ilyushin IL-96-300PU is considered a presidential machine, custom-made. Six or seven machines of this type are said to exist. The one that lands in Saint Petersburg on March 4 carries the identifier RA-96019. Other members of the government also use the fleet.
On that day in early March, it also became known that the German airport group Fraport wanted to put its Russian business on hold. Fraport owns 25 percent of the operating company of Saint Petersburg Airport – and the M-Dax company has had a problem with this investment not only since the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine. Because the Russian state bank VTB is also a shareholder in the operating company. It has been under sanctions since the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Now the German company, which is majority-owned by the state of Hesse and the city of Frankfurt, has to answer the awkward question of whether the airport is used by sanctioned politicians – or even by the Russian military. When asked by SZ and WDR, Fraport replied that they had no “access to information that is classified as a state secret. This includes, among other things, flights by members of the government”.
Military aircraft can also use the airport
However, the flights of the government aircraft are not a state secret, they can be openly observed in real time via online flight trackers such as “Flightradar24” or “OpenSky Network”. According to an analysis by SZ and WDR, at least two of these machines flew to Pulkovo after the beginning of the war: The aircraft with the registration numbers RA-96017 and RA-96019 can be assigned to the government fleet on the basis of publicly available images and videos. Foreign Minister Lavrov had also used the RA-96019 machine in the past. In 2017 he traveled to the Munich Security Conference to call for a “post-Western” world order.
The so-called Pandora Papers, a data leak that was leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), shows that military aircraft can also use Pulkovo Airport. “Pulkovo offers a full range of services, including business flights, government flights, cargo, military and medical flights,” says a document. At the beginning of the week, Fraport CEO Stefan Schulte admitted that there was a military command post at the airport. But it is only “a kind of travel agency for the military or for political use”.
In Hesse, Fraport’s business in Saint Petersburg continues to become a political issue. The Hessian FDP politician Marion Schardt-Sauer demanded: “In this situation, the state government urgently needs to present an exit strategy for the Russian holdings.” State Finance Minister Michael Boddenberg (CDU), who is also the head of the Fraport supervisory board, said before the state parliament’s budget committee: “For me, it’s absolutely crazy that this criminal is also given assets in the end.” CEO Schulte also explained that the concession contract, which runs until 2040, cannot currently be withdrawn. Schulte claims that it is contractually forbidden to sell the stake in the Russian airport before 2025. The company is also obliged to protect assets in the interests of investors.
A clause could allow the exit
A sales ban until 2025 is not found in the Pandora Papers data. But there is a clause that could allow Fraport to withdraw from the holding: If there is a qualified competitor who meets the technical requirements, he can take Fraport’s place and take over its shares – that’s what it says in one of the addendums to the contract . However, Fraport admits that all co-shareholders would have to agree to such a deal, including the Russian state bank VTB. And the city of Saint Petersburg, as the concessionaire, would also have to agree.
There, in Vladimir Putin’s hometown, the presidential plane that had flown in from Moscow 20 days earlier landed again on March 24. It didn’t stay on the ground for long, but took off again shortly afterwards, again towards the Russian capital. It is not known which passenger was on board.