To hear President Vladimir V. Putin tell it, Russia’s economy has thrived despite Western sanctions, becoming more self-sufficient and reorienting toward new markets.
But there is one company that Russian officials make no secret about missing: Boeing.
The aviation giant’s planes play a critical role in Russia’s economy, connecting its far-flung cities. Until the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Boeing sold and maintained planes in Russia and operated a major design center there. It also bought much of its titanium, a key material for modern jets, from Russia.
As President Trump pursues a striking rapprochement with Moscow, the company has emerged as an early test of whether American businesses that fled Russia early in the war will return.
Boeing has said nothing in public about whether it is considering going back, and it declined to comment for this article. But the obstacles are considerable.
Mr. Trump has so far kept in place American sanctions on Russian aviation, which give him leverage with Mr. Putin as he pursues negotiations to end the war. And there is widespread skepticism in U.S. aviation circles about the business sense of Boeing returning to Russia, a reflection of the enormous damage that three years of war have done to the country’s standing in the American corporate world.
“If given the choice between re-entering Russia and drinking bleach,” said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace consultant, “I’m sure that that glass of bleach is looking mighty good.”
For the most part, Russia’s economy has surprised outside observers with its ability to withstand sanctions and pivot away from the West. Chinese cars have replaced Western ones. Russian train factories that worked with the German company Siemens continued production on their own. A Russian payment system filled the gap left by Visa and Mastercard.
And Mr. Putin has sought a similar turnaround in aviation: The country’s own civilian aircraft, he said in 2023, needed to fill the gap left by Western plane makers that pulled out of Russia. Russia has poured billions into revamping its Soviet-era aviation industry, but experts do not expect mass production of fully Russian-made airliners to begin before 2030.
Russia’s commercial airline fleet still relies on more than 450 planes made by Boeing and its European rival, Airbus. Those jets — a lifeline for a nation spanning 11 time zones — account for more than half of the passenger planes in use in Russia today, according to Cirium, an aviation data firm.
The European Union, where Airbus is based, remains staunchly opposed to any rapprochement with Russia. Airbus also suspended its operations in Russia in 2022, although it does still buy some of its titanium there. A spokeswoman for the company said that it had other sources of the metal and was always looking to diversify its supply chain to become more resilient.
As they muddle through, Russian carriers have cannibalized some of their fleet for spare parts and restored mothballed Soviet-designed planes. The country’s leading private airline, S7, grounded its newest Airbus jets because it could not service their engines, which are from Pratt & Whitney, an American company. Aeroflot, the flagship carrier, turned to Iran to service its wide-body planes.
After more than three years of sanctions, the situation looks increasingly precarious. Repairs have been carried out without the oversight of the planes’ manufacturers, and at least some components were smuggled into the country.
Andrei V. Kramarenko, who analyzes Russian aviation at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, said airlines faced a particular challenge in servicing long-haul jets. Russia’s nonstop, eight-hour cross-country flights could become a thing of the past.
“Everyone is interested in foreign suppliers returning to Russia in two to three years,” Mr. Kramarenko said.
As a result, while the Kremlin’s overall message is that Russia is doing just fine without Western companies, officials acknowledge that Russian aviation is not.
Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said on Friday that Russia had asked the Trump administration to lift sanctions on Aeroflot as part of a “return to normal” in the U.S.-Russian relationship.
Anton Alikhanov, the trade minister, said this month that it “would be important” for the United States to release $500 million in spare airplane parts that he said Russia had purchased before sanctions were imposed. Denis Manturov, Russia’s first deputy prime minister, said in February that if Boeing was “ready to return, we are ready to consider it.”
And in an interview on the sidelines of a conference in New Delhi last month, a senior Russian lawmaker, Vyacheslav Nikonov, volunteered that he would like to see Boeing return to Russia because the country needs spare parts and because “renewing the aircraft fleet, too, would be interesting.”
Major American companies like Honeywell and G.E. also sell key aircraft parts. Neither has said it is contemplating a return to Russia.
Even if Boeing did return, analysts say, the relationship would almost certainly not be as deep as it was before the invasion — an era when Boeing operated a flight training campus in Moscow and its executives met with Mr. Putin.
Boeing has plenty of business without Russia, which accounts for a small share of the global market for parts and planes. The company has more than 5,500 outstanding orders for commercial jets and is working hard to raise output beyond a few dozen planes per month.
“There’s nothing about the industry now that’s demand constrained,” said Mr. Aboulafia, the aerospace consultant, who is a managing director at the firm AeroDynamic Advisory. “The problem is on the supply side. It has been for five years and will be for another five years.”
On top of that, Russia shook the faith of the global aviation industry by seizing hundreds of the leased planes in its fleet after sanctions were imposed in 2022. The planes’ foreign owners were forced to record multibillion-dollar losses, and the validity of the planes’ service records was thrown into doubt.
“Those aircraft will forever have a stigma against them,” said Quentin Brasie, the founder and chief executive of ACI Aviation Consulting, which offers services including aircraft appraisals. “What was done during the period they were operated and maintained in Russia? Nobody knows.”
Still, Russia has some benefits to offer. Before the 2022 invasion, it was the biggest supplier of titanium for Boeing’s commercial planes. The metal makes up about 15 percent of the structural weight of the 787 Dreamliner, according to Mr. Aboulafia.
But Boeing has diversified its sources and, analysts say, does not have an urgent need for Russian titanium.
Russia appears to be interested in a broader deal that would lift aviation-related sanctions imposed by the United States. Kirill Dmitriev, an economic envoy for the Kremlin, said after meetings with officials in Washington this month that “active work is underway” to restore direct flights between Russia and the United States.
A spokesman for Mr. Dmitriev’s main U.S. counterpart, Steve Witkoff, declined to comment on their talks, which have yet to deliver a breakthrough in resetting the U.S.-Russia relationship, even as Mr. Witkoff arrived in Russia on Friday for another round of negotiations. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters after Mr. Dmitriev’s visit that he had not “heard anything about direct flights” being restored to Russia.
Restoring flights would most likely lead the two countries to reopen their airspace to each other’s aircraft. That could benefit U.S. airlines, which have to fly around Russia on many routes to Asia, as do airlines from Europe, South Korea and Japan that are also banned from Russian airspace.
“It would be a competitive advantage compared to European and all other airlines,” said Aleksandr A. Dynkin, the president of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow.
Mr. Dynkin added that rebuilding ties with Boeing would be important given the continued hard line in Europe against rebuilding ties with Russia.
“There’s no one to talk to when it comes to Airbus,” said Mr. Dynkin, who advises the Russian Foreign Ministry. “But we can talk to Boeing.”
Edward Wong contributed reporting from Washington, and Michael Crowley from Brussels.
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