Russia is now tearing apart brand-new planes to keep older ones in the air. The country's civil aviation continues to deteriorate under international sanctions, forcing it to dismantle even new, fully equipped aircraft to obtain spare parts, Ukraine's Defense Intelligence (HUR) reports.

About 95% of all passenger traffic in Russia operates on Western-built aircraft, mostly Airbus and Boeing, according to HUR, a figure consistent with the roughly 90% EP has reported in earlier Ukrainian intelligence assessments.

Much of that fleet has flown past its guaranteed service life and would long since have been retired under international norms, but cut off from certified maintenance, Russia keeps flying it against the rules.

Repairs are carried out without proper certification, parts are often handmade from unsuitable materials, and what cannot be made is imported through third countries. 

The usable fleet is shrinking toward a hard floor

The risk of seizure abroad has boxed Russia's usable fleet into a narrow set of planes. Because of the danger of arrest in foreign jurisdictions, Russia can relatively safely operate only about 400 foreign aircraft and fewer than 150 Soviet and Russian-built machines, according to HUR.

The 400-aircraft figure tracks the roughly 400 Western jets Russia appropriated from foreign leasing companies after the 2022 full-scale war, planes it re-registered domestically and cannot fly to most of the world without risking impoundment. Ukraine's Foreign Intelligence Service reported in October 2025 that Russian carriers could shed hundreds of planes by 2030 as sanctions block imports of aircraft, parts, and maintenance, with more than a third of the civil fleet already cannibalized for parts. 

The homegrown replacement program is failing on the specifics

Russia's plan to replace Western aircraft with its own is ambitious on paper and stalling in practice. The state has a program running to 2030, worth about $12 billion, to build 994 civilian aircraft and 765 helicopters, according to HUR, but an industry cut off from Western technology cannot make components of adequate quality.

The failures are specific and checkable. The MC-21, meant to replace the Airbus A320 and Boeing 737, had to have its capacity cut from 210 to 163 seats because of problems with its domestic PD-14 engines. The Superjet has hit similar engine trouble, and Russia has abandoned new modifications of the Il-96 entirely.

Regional aviation is no better. The LMS-901 "Baikal," meant to replace the Ukrainian-designed An-2, cannot do what its predecessor could: take off and land on unprepared dirt strips. The Il-114-300, meant to replace the An-24 and An-26, can operate only from paved airfields, and the use of unsuitable propeller materials carries a risk that the propellers could fail.

Belarus has spent 2026 repairing and upgrading its civil-defense shelters nationwide, the Belarusian opposition project Belpol reported. The investigators frame the drive as another stage of the regime's militarization, tied to its alignment with Russia. They caution, though, that shelter work alone is no proof of preparing for war.

Inspections, fines, and a jump in "unfit" shelters

Belpol shared scans of the underlying documents. For example, Mahilyow Oblast had 276 civil-defense structures as of 2 June. Officials deemed 204 ready, 72 unsatisfactory, and earmarked 38 for restoration and 34 for write-off.

February–April checks produced 66 orders to fix violations and held 11 officials liable. Belpol says the rise in shelters marked unfit most likely reflects a more thorough audit, not shelters decaying in a few months.

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The work spans the whole country

The regional report is only part of the picture. Belpol points to state procurement orders for the same work across Belarus. The state telecom Beltelecom ordered design work to modernize a civil-defense space in Minsk. The National Bank of Belarus is reconstructing protective rooms in its headquarters on Independence Avenue. Brest is upgrading a bomb shelter inside a wastewater treatment complex, while Mahilyow repairs a shelter at the Strommashina plant and inspects others, including the Stroygaz enterprise. The tenders reach government offices, telecoms, industry, utilities, and banks — a centralized program, Belpol says, not scattered repairs.

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Why this fits a pattern

Belpol is careful: modernizing shelters is not by itself evidence of war planning, and many states do it for resilience. Yet since 2022, Minsk has deepened military ties with Russia, hosted joint exercises, militarized its economy, expanded territorial-defense units, and tightened its mobilization system.

Previously, France's Emmanuel Macron warned Alyaksandr Lukashenka against being dragged into the war in a May call, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy has demanded that Minsk dismantle the Russian relay stations on its soil used to guide attack drones.

Latvia's frontier with Belarus has not gone a single day without an attempted illegal crossing since late March, according to Radio Svaboda, RFE/RL's Belarusian service. The country's border service ties the sustained pressure to a state-run hybrid campaign, and its chief has named Latvia's support for Ukraine among the reasons the country has become the primary target.

An unbroken run since March

Latvia's State Border Guard has logged migrant crossing attempts from Belarus for 111 consecutive days, a Pozirk analysis of the agency's operational data found. Radio Svaboda reported the tally on 15 July.

Between 25 March and 13 July, officers recorded 7,791 attempts — an average of 70 a day. In winter the traffic was a fraction of that. From 1 January to 24 March, a span of 83 days, the agency counted just 141 attempts, or 1.7 a day. Pozirk calculated a year-to-date total of 7,932, or about 41 daily, while Latvia's State Border Guard listed 7,933.

On 13 July, the entire EU-Belarus frontier saw 42 attempts, 41 of them on the Latvian line and one on the Polish. The day before brought 41, then 87 on 11 July and 103 on 10 July, with Latvia taking the bulk each time. Lithuania has seen no crossing activity for five days.

Across the bloc's Belarus border, neighboring states logged 9,116 attempts since January. Latvia absorbed 87% of them. Lithuania took 9.9%, or 904, and Poland 3.1%, or 280.

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Riga's border chief points to its stance on Ukraine

Latvia is the number-one target in a hybrid war unleashed by the Belarusian authorities, State Border Guard head Guntis Pujāts told Delfi. The situation at the border, he said, presents serious challenges.

Pujāts said the migrant smugglers have grown more aggressive, pushing officers toward harsher detention methods and a need for wider support from the National Armed Forces. Border guards stopped roughly 7,600 people from crossing illegally this year, far more than in the same period of 2025.He said one of the causes of such pressure is Latvia's consistent support for Ukraine and its condemnation of Russian aggression. 

A campaign running since 2021

Neighboring EU states treat the flow as a hybrid attack organized by the regimes in Minsk and Moscow. Lukashenka has repeatedly said Belarusian guards will not stop migrants heading for the bloc through his country.

The crisis began in 2021, when thousands of people from Asian and African countries started crossing from Belarus into Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland in an organized way. It has continued at varying intensity since, and dozens of migrants have died along these borders.

Russia wants to start moving grain and other cargo through the Syrian naval base it leases, keeping warships at one berth and commercial shipments at the other, Reuters reported. Syrian officials describe the plan as central to Moscow's effort to hold on to Syria through trade after losing its closest Middle Eastern ally. Syria's port authority denies the project exists.

Wheat at one berth, warships at the other

Russia hopes the logistics hub at Tartus will be working by mid-July, Syrian officials said. The first cargoes, according to Ajaj, run from wheat, grain, and animal feed to vegetable and mineral oils, timber, steel, clinker, coal, rice, and sugar. Organizers are targeting about 250,000 tons of cargo a month. The opening shipment is meant to be 30,000 tons of grain.

Rus Line, a Syrian logistics firm, is developing the hub together with Russian companies that sit under the Russian-Syrian Business Council — a body run by Russia's Industry and Trade Ministry. The council announced an "assembly and distribution center for Russian goods" at the port on 6 June.

Pier No. 4 is where the cargo will be handled, Rus Line chief executive Jinan Mubadda said. The company's general manager, Ossama Ajaj, called that pier a "restricted zone" of the naval base, and said the site stays under Syrian command: nothing moves without a green light from Syria's General Authority for Ports and Customs. Ajaj also suggested Russia would keep a "reduced military presence."

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The port authority rejected the account after publication. Spokesman Mazen Alloush called reports of a Russian commercial hub at Tartus "entirely false" and said any deal over Syrian ports or border crossings would go public only via official state channels.

The plan builds a regular shipping line between Novorossiysk—Russia's port on the northeastern Black Sea coast—and Tartus, with goods distributed onward across Syria and its neighbors. Iraq and Jordan come first on Ajaj's list of destinations, with the Gulf — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain — next in line.

What Moscow already holds in Syria

The hub would extend an economic grip that survived the collapse of Russia's military position. Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea supply 85% of the wheat Syria imports — 2.9 million tons this 2025-26 season, according to a Syrian customs document. Ukraine's Foreign Intelligence Service has documented that shipments of grain grown on occupied Ukrainian land resumed to Syria in 2025.

Syrian reliance on Russian crude has grown since Assad's fall. The country took about 16.8 million barrels of Russian oil in 2025 and roughly 60,000 barrels a day in early 2026.

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After Assad fell in 2024, Moscow lost its main Middle Eastern ally, and its Syrian leases became uncertain. In 2025, Syria canceled Stroytransgaz's 49-year contract to develop commercial facilities at Tartus — the very business Russia is now trying to restart.

Russian military flights returned to the Hmeimim airbase in late October 2025. Moscow and Damascus are still negotiating the fate of both installations. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed in June that the sides were discussing a possible "reformatting" of Russia's military facilities.