Russia will not produce by its own forces the Ukrainian transport aircraft An-124 "Ruslan". Instead, domestic engineers will develop another superheavy transport. It will appear within the next ten years. At the moment, at the disposal of our country there is a fairly large park of operating "Ruslanov". Therefore, there is no need to build new aircraft of this type, Deputy Prime Minister Yury Borisov told reporters today. He noted that the An-124 will be modernized.

When updating the on-board radio electronic equipment and replacing Ukrainian D-18 engines with Russian D-35s, the Ruslans can be operated until 2050. In the future, the Russian Federation will switch to other aircraft. "They are in terms of research work at the end of the adopted state arms program," - quotes the official of the RIA Novosti news agency.. The current state program of armaments is designed until 2027. So, approximately by this time, the Russian Federation will acquire its own transport. Reports about the upcoming development of aircraft for the replacement of "Ruslan" appeared at the end of June. But the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) refuted such rumors. The aircraft builders then stated that their priority was the maintenance of the serviceability of the already used Russian An-124 and Il-76 transport aircraft. At about the same time, the Defense Ministry announced that Ruslans would be built in our country under a new brand. However, representatives of the Ukrainian enterprise Antonov considered it impossible to manufacture cargo planes by Russian companies. "In the case of modernization, it is envisaged to introduce changes in the standard design. At the same time, only the developer of the Antonov aircraft possesses all the technical knowledge and necessary information on the design, properties, resources, lifetime and airworthiness of the An-124-100 aircraft, including test data and analyzes necessary to maintain the integrity of the structure, " in Kiev. Russian experts noted that Ruslan is going to two-thirds of the domestic components, so it can not be called purely Ukrainian development.

An-124-100 "Ruslan" - the most load-lifting commercial cargo plane. It was constructed in the first half of the 1980s. The aircraft was serially produced in Ulyanovsk from 1984 to 2004. After this, Moscow and Kiev for a long time negotiated the joint production of modernized An-124. But in 2014 g. Ukraine announced withdrawal from the project due to a difficult political situation. In total, 55 cars were produced in Ulyanovsk, of which 26 are in the disposal of Russia's VCS (about 10 in the flying condition).