Racist propaganda resources spread the statement of the commander of the military transport aviation “VKS RF” Lieutenant General Vladimir Benediktov that in 2024 “exploitation will be stopped” of the last available An-22 “Antey” military transport aircraft.
This message attracted attention, since the An-22 itself is rare for the military transport aviation of the Russian Federation, The Military Balance 2023 guide says that there are only three aircraft of this type. In addition, references to the Russian An-22 in the public domain were quite rare.
The last known reference to the Rashist An-22 dates back to July 2022. Then, as the authors of the resource “Belarusian Gayun” on the night of July 14, 2022, two An-22 “Antey” of the military transport aviation of the Russian Federation, with registration numbers RF-09309 and RA-09341, delivered an unknown cargo to the “Machulyshchi” airfield. near Minsk.
What kind of cargo it was remained unknown, the unloading of both “boards” it took four hours, after which each of these planes apparently flew to Tver and Taganrog, respectively. And this was the only mention in public sources of Russian An-22 precisely during the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation into Ukraine.
On this topic Can you remember what the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation mentioned about the An-22 “Antey”? in the message about the training flights of its military transport aviation in July 2020 in the Tver region.
But it is quite telling that the mention of the use of the An-22 by the Russians during the intervention in Kazakhstan in January 2022 or during the operation of the aviation component of the “Syrian Express” starting in 2015 – was not publicly available. Although this does not exclude in general the possibility that the Russians could have used An-22 transporters in these episodes. ; also had two aircraft of this type in storage (as of 2010). At the same time, the status of another 18 An-22 aircraft, which were “inherited” transferred to the Russian military. Probably, the decision of the Russian military to finally abandon the operation of the An-22 is related to the fact that it has become impossible to maintain the technical readiness of these transporters even by the method of “cannibalism of components”.
However, in 2012 the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation stated about the plan to finally write off its An-22 “Antey” in 2020.