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Canada initiated the confiscation of the world’s largest transport aircraft of the Russian Federation

The world’s largest Russian cargo plane An-124, which has been at the Toronto airport for the third year, will be confiscated. This was announced by the press service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Canada, informs Insauga.

The case regarding the confiscation of the Russian plane is pending in the Ontario Superior Court.

“On March 18, 2025, the Attorney General of Canada filed a forfeiture application with the Ontario Superior Court,” – said the representative of the department.

An-124 is one of 26 aircraft of this type in the world. Its height reaches seven stories, and its length is almost as long as a football field. The cost of building a similar aircraft is about 300 million dollars. The aircraft belongs to the private Russian cargo airline “Volga-Dnepr” and after the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine, it delivered large batches of test systems for the detection of the coronavirus to Canada from China. After Canadian airspace was closed to Russian airlines on February 27, 2022, the plane remained in the country and could not take off.

On June 8, 2023, the Canadian authorities arrested this plane and announced their intention to hand it over to Ukraine. Former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he would soon receive the plane and that Russia “will never be able to return it.”

In order to legally ensure the transfer of the plane, the Canadian government clarified the arrest warrant, including not the Russian state, but Volga-Dnepr and Sberbank. This should simplify the confiscation procedure. In a government statement, it was noted that serious measures were being taken to “finally confiscate the property”.

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Volga-Dnepr airline company, which is the owner of the plane, did not agree with the confiscation and filed a lawsuit in the Ottawa court at the end of 2023. The legal battle continues as the company tries to prove that Canada’s sanctions against its assets are illegal. Last August, Volga-Dnepr filed a lawsuit against the Canadian government for $100 million. In its justification, the company referred to the bilateral investment agreement between the USSR and Canada of 1989, which does not provide for the confiscation of property.

The plane will not be able to leave Canada quickly – after a long layover on the runway, it needs serious maintenance to restore airworthiness. In addition, the Toronto Airport Authority expects to pay a significant amount for the storage of the aircraft.

The founder of Volga-Dnepr, businessman Oleksiy Isaykin, was sanctioned by the USA, Canada and Great Britain after the start of the war. In the 1990s, the former military economist created a company with An-124-100 cargo planes, which contributed to maintaining their popularity on the world market.

Before the full-scale war with Ukraine, the company was one of the leaders in the field of transportation of oversized cargo. After 2022, its top managers — Igor Aksenov, Valery Gabriel, Serhii Dyachkov and Vildan Zinnurov — became the owners of the company.

 

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