In a corner of the departures area at Rostov airport in southern Russia, a group of about 130 men, many of them carrying overstuffed military-style rucksacks, lined up at four check-in desks beneath screens that showed no flight number or destination.
When a Reuters reporter asked the men about their destination, one said: “We signed a piece of paper — we’re not allowed to say anything. Any minute the boss will come and we’ll get into trouble.”
“You too,” he warned.
Illustration: Louise Ting
The chartered Airbus A320 waiting on the tarmac for them had just flown in from the Syrian capital, Damascus, disgorging about 30 men with tanned faces into the largely deserted arrivals area. Most were in camouflage gear and khaki desert boots. Some were toting bags from the Damascus airport duty-free.
The men were private Russian military contractors, the latest human cargo in a secretive airlift using civilian airplanes to ferry military support to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his six-year fight against rebels, a Reuters investigation of the logistical network behind al-Assad’s forces has uncovered.
The Airbus that they flew on was just one of dozens of aircraft that once belonged to mainstream European and US aviation companies, then were passed through a web of intermediary companies and offshore firms to Middle Eastern airlines subject to US sanctions — moves that Washington alleges are helping Syria bypass the sanctions.
The flights in and out of Rostov, which no organization has previously documented, are operated by Cham Wings, a Syrian airline hit with US sanctions in 2016 for allegedly transporting pro-government fighters to Syria and helping Syrian military intelligence transport weapons and equipment.
The flights, which almost always land late at night, do not appear in any airport or airline timetables, and fly in from either Damascus or Latakia, a Syrian city where Russia has a military base.
GAPS IN SANCTIONS
The operation lays bare the gaps in the US sanctions, which are designed to starve al-Assad and his allies in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and the Hezbollah militia of the men and material that they need to wage their military campaign.
It also provides a glimpse of the methods used to send private Russian military contractors to Syria — a deployment that the Kremlin insists does not exist.
Russian officials say Moscow’s presence is limited to airstrikes, training of Syrian forces and small numbers of special forces troops.
Reuters reporters staked out the Rostov airport, logged the unusual flights using publicly available flight-tracking data, searched aircraft ownership registries and conducted dozens of interviews, including a meeting at a fashionable restaurant with a former Soviet marine major on a US government blacklist.
Asked about the flights and the activities of Russian private military contractors in Syria, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin referred Reuters to the Russian Ministry of Defense — which did not reply to the questions. Nor did the Syrian government reply to questions.
In response to detailed Reuters questions, Cham Wings said only that information on where it flies was available on its Web site.
The flights to Rostov are not mentioned on the site, but the journeys do appear in online flight-tracking databases. Reporters traced flights between the Rostov airport and Syria from Jan. 5 last year to March 11 this year. In that time, Cham Wings aircraft made 51 round trips, each time using Airbus A320 jets that can carry up to 180 passengers.
The issue of military casualties is highly sensitive in Russia, where memories linger of operations in Chechnya and Afghanistan that dragged on for years. Friends and relatives of the contractors suspect that Moscow is using the private fighters in Syria because that way it can put more boots on the ground without risking regular soldiers, whose deaths have to be accounted for.
Forty-four regular Russian service personnel have died in Syria since the start of the operation there in September 2015, according to the Russian authorities.
This number does not include 39 Russian service personnel who died in a non-combat airplane crash in Latakia on March 6.
A Reuters tally based on accounts from families and friends of the dead and local officials suggests that at least 40 contractors were killed between January and August last year alone.
One contractor killed in Syria left Russia on a date that tallies with one of the mysterious nighttime flights out of Rostov, his widow said.
The death certificate issued by the Russian consulate in Damascus gave his cause of death as “hemorrhagic shock from shrapnel and bullet wounds.”
ACCESS TO AIRCRAFT
To sustain his military campaign against rebels, al-Assad and his allies in Russia, Iran and the Hezbollah militia need access to civilian aircraft to fly in men and supplies. Washington has tried to choke off access to the aircraft and their parts through export restrictions on Syria and Iran and through US Department of the Treasury sanctions blacklisting airlines in those countries. The Treasury Department has also blacklisted several companies outside Syria, accusing them of acting as intermediaries.
“These actions demonstrate our resolve to target anyone who is enabling al-Assad and his regime,” Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control director John Smith said in testimony to the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Monetary Policy and Trade on Nov. 30 last year.
In recent years, dozens of airplanes have been registered in Ukraine to two firms, Khors and Dart, that were founded by a former Soviet marine major, Sergei Tomchani, and his one-time military comrades, according to the Ukraine national aircraft register.
The airplanes were then sold or leased and ended up being operated by Iranian and Syrian airlines, the flight-tracking data showed.
One of the companies, Khors, and Tomchani have been on a US Department of Commerce blacklist since 2011 for allegedly exporting aircraft to Iran and Syria without obtaining licenses from Washington.
However, in the past seven years, Khors and Dart have managed to acquire or lease 84 secondhand Airbus and Boeing aircraft by passing the aircraft through layers of non-sanctioned entities, according to information collated by Reuters from national aircraft registers.
Of these 84 aircraft, at least 40 have since been used in Iran, Syria and Iraq, according to data from three flight-tracking Web sites, which show the routes that aircraft fly and give the call sign of the company operating them.
The Treasury Department in September last year added Khors and Dart to its sanctions blacklist, saying that they were helping sanctioned airlines procure US-made aircraft.
Khors and Dart, as well as Tomchani, have denied any wrongdoing related to supplying airplanes to sanctioned entities.
The ownership histories of some of the aircraft tracked by Reuters showed how the US restrictions on supplies to Iranian and Syrian airlines can be skirted. As the ownership skips from one country to the next, the complex paper trail masks the identity of those involved in Syria’s procurement of the airplanes.
One of the Cham Wings Airbus A320 jets that has made the Rostov-Syria trip was, according to the Irish aircraft register, once owned by ILFC Ireland Ltd, a subsidiary of Dublin-based AerCap, one of the world’s biggest aircraft-leasing firms.
The aircraft was in January 2015 removed from the Irish register, said a spokesman for the Irish Aviation Authority, which administers the register.
For the next two months, the aircraft, which carried the identification number EI-DXY, vanished from national registers before showing up on the aircraft register in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian register gave its new owner as Gresham Marketing Ltd, which is registered in the British Virgin Islands. The owners of the company are two Ukrainians, Viktor Romanika and Nikolai Saverchenko, according to corporate documents leaked from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. Ukrainian business records show that they are managers in small local businesses.
Contacted by telephone, Romanika said he knew nothing and hung up.
Saverchenko could not be reached by phone and did not respond to a letter delivered to the address listed for him.
Gresham in March 2015 leased EI-DXY to Dart, according to the Ukrainian aircraft register. The identification number was changed to a Ukrainian number, UR-CNU. On Aug. 20, 2015, Khors on became the aircraft’s operator, the register showed.
A representative of the Ukraine State Aviation Service said that the register was not intended as official confirmation of ownership, but that there had been no complaints about the accuracy of its information.
From April that year, the aircraft was flown by Cham Wings, according to data from the flight-tracking Web sites.
Gillian Culhane, a spokeswoman for AerCap, the firm whose subsidiary owned the airplane in 2015, did not respond to written questions or answer repeated telephone calls seeking comment about what AerCap knew about the subsequent owners and operators of the airplane.
Dart and Khors did not respond to questions about the specific aircraft.
Four lawyers specializing in US export rules said that transactions involving aircraft that end up in Iran or Syria carry significant risks for Western companies supplying the airplanes or equipment.
Even if they had no direct dealings with a sanctioned entity, the companies supplying the aircraft can face penalties or restrictions imposed by the US government, the lawyers said.
However, the legal exposure for aircraft makers such as Boeing and Airbus was minimal, because the trade involves secondhand aircraft that are generally more than 20 years old, and the airplanes had been through a long chain of owners before ending up with operators subject to sanctions, they said.
Two of the lawyers, including Edward Krauland, who leads the international regulation and compliance group at law firm Steptoe & Johnson, said that US export rules apply explicitly to Boeing aircraft because they are made in the US, but that they can also apply to Airbus jets because, in many cases, many of the components are of US origin.
Boeing said in a statement: “The aircraft transactions described that are the subject of your inquiry did not involve the Boeing Company. Boeing maintains a robust overall trade control and sanctions compliance program.”
An Airbus spokesman said: “Airbus fully respects all applicable legal requirements with regard to transactions with countries under UN, EU, UK and US sanctions.”
WAR-ZONE FLIGHTS
When Reuters sent a series of questions to Khors and Dart about their activities, Tomchani, the former marine major, called the reporter within minutes.
He said that he was no longer a shareholder in either firm, but was acting as a consultant to them, and that the questions had been passed on to him.
He invited the reporter to meet the following day at the high-end Velyur Restaurant in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital.
In the 90-minute meeting, he denied providing aircraft to Iran or Syria.
Instead, he said that Khors and Dart had provided aircraft to third parties, which he did not identify.
Those third parties supplied the airplanes on to the end users, he said.
“We did not supply aircraft to Iran,” Tomchani, a man of military bearing in his late 50s, said as he sipped herbal tea. “We have nothing to do with supplying aircraft to Cham Wings.”
Neither Dart nor Khors could have sold or leased aircraft to Cham Wings because they were not the owners of the aircraft, he said.
Tomchani used to serve in a marine unit of the Soviet armed forces in Vladivostok, on Russia’s Pacific coast. In 1991, after quitting the military with the rank of major, he set up Khors along with two other officers in his unit. Tomchani and his partners made a living by flying Soviet-built aircraft, sold off cheap after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in war zones.
Khors flew cargo trips in Angola for the Angolan government, its defense ministry and aid agencies during its civil war.
Tomchani said his companies also operated flights in Iraq after the US-led invasion in 2003, transporting private security contractors.
Ukraine’s register of business ownership showed that Tomchani ceased to be a shareholder in Khors after June 2010, and that he gave up his interest in Dart at some point after April 2011.
He told Reuters that he sold his stakes to “major businessmen,” but declined to name them.
However, he did say that the people listed at the time of the interview in Ukraine’s business register as the owners of the two companies were merely proxies.
One of the owners in the register was a mid-ranking Khors executive, one was an 81-year-old accountant for several Kiev firms, and another was someone with the same name and address as a librarian from Melitopol in southeast Ukraine.
According to the business register, the owner of 25 percent in Khors is someone called Vladimir Suchkov. The address listed for him in the register is No. 33, Elektrikov Street, Kiev. That is the same address as the one listed in Ukrainian government procurement documents for military unit No. A0515, which comes under the command of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense’s Main Intelligence Directorate.
Tomchani said he and Suchkov were old acquaintances.
“He wasn’t a bad specialist,” Tomchani said. “A young lad, but not bad.”
He said he believed that Suchkov was living in Russia.
Reuters was unable to contact Suchkov. A telephone number listed for him was out of service.
Main Intelligence Directorate acting head Alexei Bakumenko told Reuters that Suchkov does not work there.
Reuters found no evidence of any other link between the trade in aircraft and Ukraine’s broader spy apparatus.
Ukrainian military intelligence said it has no knowledge of the supply of aircraft to Syria, has no connection to the transport of military contractors from Russia to Syria, and has not cooperated with Khors, Dart or Cham Wings.
Dart on Jan. 9 this year changed its name to Alanna and listed a new address and founders, according to the Ukrainian business register.
A new company, Alanna Air, on March 1 took over Alanna’s assets and liabilities, the register showed.
CONTRACTORS’ CASKETS
Although Moscow denies that it is sending private military contractors to Syria, plenty of people say that is untrue.
Among them are dozens of friends and former colleagues of the fighters and people associated with the firm that recruits the men — a shadowy organization known as Wagner that has no offices, not even a brass plaque on a door.
It was founded by Dmitry Utkin, a former military intelligence officer, people interviewed during this investigation said.
Its first combat role was in eastern Ukraine in support of Moscow-backed separatists, they said.
Reuters was unable to contact Utkin directly.
The League of Veterans of Local Conflicts, which according to Russian media has ties to Utkin, declined to pass on a message to him, saying that it had no connection to the Wagner group.
Russia has 2,000 to 3,000 contractors fighting in Syria, said Yevgeny Shabayev, local leader of a paramilitary organization in Russia who is in touch with some of the men.
In a single battle in February this year, about 300 contractors were either killed or wounded, a military doctor and two other sources familiar with the matter said.
A Russian private military contractor who has been on four missions to Syria said that he arrived there on board a Cham Wings flight from Rostov.
The flights were the main route for transporting the contractors, said the man, who asked to be identified only by his first name, Vladimir.
The contractors occasionally use Russian military aircraft as well, when they cannot all fit on the Cham Wings jets, he said.
Two employees at Rostov airport talked to Reuters about the men on the mysterious flights to Syria.
“Our understanding is that these are contractors,” said an employee who claimed that he assisted with boarding for several of the Syria flights.
He pointed to their destination, the fact that there were no women among them and that they carried military-style rucksacks.
He spoke on condition of anonymity, saying that he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Reuters was not able to establish how many passengers were carried between Russia and Syria, and it is possible that some of those on board were not in Syria in combat roles. Some might have landed in Damascus, and then flown to other destinations outside Syria.
WIDOWS’ TESTIMONY
Interviews with relatives of contractors killed in Syria also indicate that the A320 flights to Rostov are used to transport Russian military contractors.
The widow of one contractor killed in Syria said that the last time she spoke to her husband by telephone was on Jan. 21 last year — the same day, according to flight-tracking data, that a Cham Wings charter flew to Syria.
“He called on the evening of the 21st... There were men talking and the sound of walkie-talkies. And by the 22nd he was already unreachable. Only text messages were reaching him,” said the woman, who had previously visited her husband at a training camp for the contractors in southern Russia.
After he was killed, his body was delivered to Russia, she said.
She received a death certificate saying that he had died of “hemorrhagic shock from shrapnel and bullet wounds.”
The widows of two other contractors killed in Syria described how their husbands’ bodies arrived back home. Like the first widow, they spoke on condition of anonymity.
They said representatives of the organization that recruited their husbands warned of repercussions if they spoke to the media.
The two contractors had been on previous combat tours, their widows said.
They received death certificates giving Syria as the location of death, the women said.
Reuters saw the certificates: On one, the cause of death was listed as “carbonization of the body” — in other words, he burned to death.
The other man bled to death from multiple shrapnel wounds, the certificate said.
One of the widows recounted conversations with her husband after he returned from his first tour of duty to Syria.
He told her that Russian contractors there are often sent into the thick of the battle and are the first to enter captured towns, she said.
Syrian government forces then come into the town and raise their flags, he told her, taking credit for the victory.
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