For twenty years, the way NATO moved something too big for its own aeroplanes was to ring a Ukrainian company and a Russian one.

That sentence has aged badly, and the arrangement behind it is one of the stranger things the post-Cold-War world produced: a Western military alliance whose heavy airlift depended on a Soviet design, built in Ulyanovsk and Kyiv, operated by two competitors who agreed to market their aircraft as a single pool.

Two airlines, one aeroplane

When the Soviet Union dissolved, the An-124 fleet split roughly along the border. Antonov, the design bureau in Kyiv, set up Antonov Airlines. Volga-Dnepr was founded in Ulyanovsk, where the Russian assembly line was.

Both discovered the same thing: there was a global market for flying objects that nothing else could carry, and they were the only two suppliers in it.

In 2006 they stopped competing on availability and formed Ruslan International, a joint venture to market both fleets together. If you needed an An-124 next Tuesday, you no longer cared whose it was. That arrangement ran for a decade and was wound up at the end of 2016.

Leipzig/Halle, and the two aircraft on standby

The military version of the same deal is SALIS — the Strategic Airlift Interim Solution. Germany led it in the 2000s, and the word interim was doing real work: it was supposed to cover the gap until the A400M arrived.

Under the contract, two An-124s sit at Leipzig/Halle in a ready state, one from each operator originally, with two more available at six days’ notice and another two at nine. Eighteen NATO and EU countries can call on them. The aircraft proved indispensable in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the airport became the de facto European base of the type.

The commercial customers nobody thinks about

Military work is the visible part. The commercial book is stranger and probably larger.

United Launch Alliance moves Atlas V boosters from Decatur, Alabama to Cape Canaveral by An-124, and Atlas V and Centaur stages from Denver to both Canaveral and Vandenberg — two flights per launch vehicle. Space Systems Loral has flown satellites from Palo Alto to the spaceport at Kourou. SpaceX has moved payload fairings from Hawthorne to Florida the same way.

Outside space there are locomotives, metro railcars for Delhi, mining plant, power station components, the Obelisk of Axum going home to Ethiopia, a concrete pump flown to Japan to cool the reactors at Fukushima, and an 87,000-pound die tool rushed from Michigan to Nottingham so Ford could restart F-150 production after a factory fire.

And then February 2022

Volga-Dnepr had already withdrawn from the NATO contract, reportedly ahead of anticipated American sanctions. After the invasion the position became absolute. Russian-operated An-124s could not fly in Western airspace at all.

Three of them are still at Leipzig/Halle, along with a stock of spare parts, going nowhere. A fourth has been sitting at Toronto Pearson since 2022, caught on the ground when Canada closed its airspace. Volga-Dnepr Group has been reported as being put up for sale under the weight of sanctions.

Antonov Airlines, meanwhile, lost an aircraft outright at Hostomel and diverted five more to Leipzig, where it now runs the European operation alone. Its aircraft carry slogans on the nose: Be brave like Kharkiv, Be brave like Irpin.

Interim, thirty years on

The fleet at Leipzig averages just under thirty-seven years old. The SALIS contract expires in the early 2030s. The European C-17s run out in the 2040s.

That is the whole predicament in one sentence. A capability described as interim in 2006 is now the only thing holding up European outsize airlift, it depends on aircraft built before most of their crews were born, and the company that used to supply half of it cannot legally fly.

Sources: NATO SALIS programme documentation; Antonov Airlines; Volga-Dnepr Group; The Loadstar; Air Cargo News; aeroTELEGRAPH; European Defence Agency.