Free Outlaws Inc. by Matt Potter Page A

in Vitebsk, Smolensk is home to a colossal military-transport air regiment—the combat-ready Il-76s of the 103rd Military Transport Air Regiment—and a famous Soviet-era military academy. The Military Air Defense Academy of the Land Forces of the Russian Federation is Russia’s crack rocket and antiaircraft artillery training school—the first line of defense against the airborne aggression from the West on which, until 1991, the Soviet Union was betting its bottom ruble. Today its recruits play their part in the deployment of Russian forces abroad as well as in defense of the homeland. But unknown to most recruits and enlisted men, the academy was also the scene of one of the most bizarre heists in modern Russian history.
    Sometime in the mid-1990s—details are understandably hard to come by—it was decided by the authorities that a fitting statue should be installed in tribute to the academy’s graduates and their work for Russia’s armed forces. Calls were made, permissions granted, and the military, with thanks to the snappily branded Ilyushin-Tashkent Aviation Production Association down in Uzbekistan, donated a suitable installation: a giant, pristine Il-76 aircraft to stand proudly as a piece of mighty, industrial-age sculpture at the entrance gates. It was a huge, jaw-dropping symbol of Russia’s adventures abroad, a reminder of just what was possible. The authorities and military top brass trumpeted this coup. But on the day of the great unveiling, the installation was nowhere to be seen. Because someone—someone who’d been tracking the progress of the Il-76 statue very closely indeed—had other ideas. According to investigators Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, somewhere en route to the academy, the warplane simply vanished.
    Tantalizing details slowly emerged, though even they were sketchy. It appeared that, having first persuaded an official somewhere along the line between factory and delivery to redesignate the plane as scrap metal, the audacious would-be owner then helpfully arranged to take the seventy-two tons of “scrap” off their hands, diverting it to a third destination—and then re-registered it in a loosely regulated regime and flew it off on its first job. Anywhere else, it would be the crime of the century. In the context of free-for-all early-to-mid-1990s Russia, with entire, security-policed payroll trains disappearing from the rails between stations, tanks firing on Parliament in an attempt to steal the newborn state itself, and tons of military ordnance vanishing on reaching Chechnya, it was depressingly normalno —another day, another screw-over.
    â€œOf course, there was the big sell-off of military equipment—but theft is the other big way in which planes got ‘liberated,’ ” says Mark Galeotti. “Never underestimate the sheer amount of malfeasance in the former Soviet Union at that time. A lot of kit got written off as ‘destroyed,’ and just disappeared when units were being transferred back to Russia from far-flung locations. It’s horrific how much. Even before the Soviet Union collapsed, much of the kit that was being brought back from East Germany seems to have ‘got lost’ in transit. Estimates of how much vary dramatically, but the main ones were things that had practical civilian use. According to one figure I’ve been given, half of all the Soviet armed forces’ motorbikes disappeared! Because that’s something you can literally just wheel down to the local bar and say, ‘Anyone like to buy a motorbike?’ And admittedly, RPG-7 grenade launchers are a bit trickier.”
    Clearly, he says, given the difficulty in selling an Il-76 in a bar, whoever got the installation written off as “destroyed” then flew it away, having had what Galeotti calls a “practical civilian use” in mind for it.
    It’s a mystery that’s likely to remain