By Tengo Gogotishvili | 2023-11-30

TBILISI -- Russia's plans to invest in and reopen an airport in a breakaway region of Georgia are arousing suspicion from aviation and security observers.

After unleashing its full-scale war in Ukraine, Russia has had to close 11 civilian airports in the center and south of the country.

The Krasnodar, Anapa, Gelendzhik, Rostov-on-Don, Bryansk, Voronezh, Belgorod, Kursk, Lipetsk, Simferopol and Elista airports have not been operational since February 24, 2022, given Russia's concerns over possible Ukrainian strikes.

As such, Moscow's discussion of restoring a shuttered airport in the Abkhazia region, which separatists and Russian troops carved away from Georgia in 1993, is not all that surprising.

Only Venezuela, Nicaragua, Nauru and Syria joined Russia in recognizing Abkhazia as a country.

The rest of the world considers Abkhazia Georgian territory occupied by Russia.

Well-connected Russian investor

Plans call for the Babushera airport in Sukhumi, the Abkhaz capital, to reopen for passengers in January 2025.

However, talks about the airport project started months ago.

At the end of October, Moscow revealed the mystery Russian investor behind the venture.

He is Rashid Nurgaliyev, who bears the same name as his father, a former Russian interior minister and current first deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council.

The father is on the sanctions list of numerous countries.

The son graduated from the Federal Security Service (FSB) Academy. Russia has designated him as the investor for "the construction project of the century."

The project aims to restore operations at the Babushera airport, which has been officially closed since the early 1990s.

Opportunity for illicit profits

For someone so well connected, restoring Babushera could be immensely lucrative.

In June, when Russian Minister of Economic Development Maxim Reshetnikov signed an investment agreement with Kristina Ozgan, his Abkhaz "counterpart," the pact set the project cost at 6.5 billion RUB ($74 million).

By the end of October, when Nurgaliyev's name came to light, the expected cost suddenly jumped to 11 billion RUB ($125 million).

That amount is close to Abkhazia's entire annual budget of 12.5 billion RUB ($140 million).

Thus, Russia is prepared to spend almost as much on a single airport as it spends in a year to prop up all of Abkhazia through aid, grants and subsidies.

"This is the most flawed agreement in our country's entire history [since the 1993 occupation]," said Adgur Ardzinba, leader of the opposition Abkhazian People's Movement.

"The airport is necessary, of course, but its opening at this time reflects the desires of Russia's leadership. And our government was unable to produce a document that would even in the slightest correspond to the interests of our state," he said.

Ardzinba's opinion reflects an understanding of the Russian practice of inflating estimates of construction costs -- and then pocketing the difference, as Nurgaliyev would be positioned to do.

Attracting sanctions

Still an even bigger matter remains undetermined: who will risk flying into an international "gray zone" after January 2025, the scheduled completion date of the airport restoration?

Major Russian airport management firms already are shying away from the project, Vedomosti reported in September.

Some sources cite the risk of international sanctions; others note the dearth of likely passenger traffic.

Flights from abroad, except from Russia, are unlikely to occur anytime soon, making the revenue picture bleak.

"The Sukhumi airport will never receive international status," said Vaso Urushadze, an aviation analyst in Tbilisi.

"It is located in territory not controlled by Georgia. International regulators like the ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organization], IATA [International Air Transport Association], and Eurocontrol Navigation won't allow it," he told Kontur.

Bringing the airport into service would introduce unwanted competition for the nearby airport in Sochi, Russia, and the airlines using it, he said.

In addition, any airlines that fly to Abkhazia are subject to sanctions. In 2006, the ICAO revoked the Babushera airport's code and wiped all associated information from its registry.

But in 2019, Russia violated the order by "sharing" its own code -- URAS -- with Abkhazia's airspace.

According to the United States, revamping the airport changes nothing.

"The United States considers Sokhumi [Sukhumi] Airport to be part of Georgia's airspace," US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporter Alex Raufoglu in August.

Military function?

Urushadze, the Tbilisi-based aviation analyst, has a bleak view of Russia's plans for the airport.

"Russian authorities are planning transport infrastructure for a future war with Georgia," he said of the project.

Russia also has plans to set up a naval base on Abkhazia's Black Sea coast, Abkhaz leader Aslan Bzhania told pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia in an interview published October 5.

The announcement came on the back of several Ukrainian attacks on Russia's Black Sea Fleet that have embarrassed the Kremlin.

The plan was "a flagrant violation of Georgia's sovereignty and territorial integrity," said Georgian authorities.