Russian-registered aircraft have been banned from European Union airspace since 2022. On the morning of 16 September, one landed in Germany anyway, with permission, and with the German foreign ministry explaining why.

At 09:36 an Ilyushin Il-96-300 in the white-and-tricolour livery of Russia’s Special Flight Squadron touched down on runway 06/24 at Cologne/Bonn. Registration RA-96018. It had come from Moscow-Vnukovo by a route that took roughly four hours for a flight that should take rather less.

It was there to collect diplomats Germany had just expelled, over a drone that was found sitting next to a Ukrainian cargo aircraft.

The Flight Itself Was the Story

Under EU sanctions imposed after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, aircraft registered in Russia cannot fly to or over EU member states. Regulation 833/2014 does allow case-by-case exemptions, and this was one.

A spokesman for the German Federal Foreign Office in Berlin confirmed that permission had been granted for a Russian special flight “in connection with the departure of the staff of the Russian Consulate General in Bonn”.

Permission to land is not the same as permission to fly over everyone in between. The Il-96 skirted several NATO states on its way west and entered German airspace from the Baltic, which is why a journey of roughly 2,000 km took about four hours. Flightradar24 was tracking it before it arrived.

The aircraft did not linger. It was scheduled to leave again around midday and be back in Moscow four and a half hours later. It is about nineteen years old.

Why Germany Expelled Them

The chain that ended with a Russian widebody on a German runway began overnight on 4 to 5 August, at Leipzig/Halle Airport in Saxony.

A drone carrying explosives was found on airport grounds beside a Ukrainian Antonov An-124 cargo aircraft. It had struck the aircraft and failed to detonate. It sat there for around four hours before anyone noticed it. Later analysis indicated it had been aimed at the area of the aircraft’s fuel tanks.

That is not a nuisance drone. An An-124 is one of the largest aircraft flying, Ukraine has very few left, and they are central to how outsize cargo moves around Europe. Leipzig/Halle is one of the main hubs for that traffic.

German investigators named two suspects, a Russian-born man holding a Latvian passport and a Belarusian man holding a Russian one, and concluded both had links to Russian state structures. On 1 September the German government formally attributed the attack to Russia.

The Diplomatic Arithmetic

Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul and Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt announced the response together: close the Russian Consulate General in Bonn, terminate the agreement covering the Russian House in Berlin, and tighten entry controls for Russian citizens.

The consulate closes on 18 September. The consul general and posted staff had to be out of the country by Friday, which is why an aircraft was needed and why it could not simply be a scheduled flight. Russia denies any involvement in the Leipzig attack, categorically, and responded by ordering the German Consulate General in St Petersburg closed by the same date.

So the Il-96 on the Cologne/Bonn runway is the visible end of a fairly precise exchange. Two consulates, one deadline, one aircraft each way.

A Note on the Aeroplane

The Il-96 itself is worth a glance. It is a four-engined widebody, the last big Soviet-designed airliner to reach production, and it survives today essentially because the Russian state keeps a handful flying for government transport. Aeroflot gave up on it commercially years ago.

That makes appearances like this one of the very few chances anybody in Western Europe gets to see one. A type that lost its commercial argument decades ago, kept alive as a flag carrier in the literal sense, landing in Germany on a diplomatic errand it could only fly with written permission.

Sources: German Federal Foreign Office; aero.de; aeroTELEGRAPH; Flightradar24; France 24; NPR