Tajikistan Jails Russian Airline Pilots for—What?

Tajikistan may not be able to stop billions of dollars of heroin passing through the country, but dog gone it, an extra airplane engine is not getting through. 

That’s the message a bizarre case in the southern city of Kurgan-Tyube is sending. On November 8, a Tajik court sentenced two pilots for a Russian charter aviation company – Russian Vladimir Sadovnichy and Estonian Alexei Rudenko – to eight and a half years for trespassing, violating international air traffic rules and smuggling, after they landed in March with a spare engine on board.

The two were flying a pair of Antonov-72s from Kabul to Moscow for a company called Rolkan Investments Ltd. They had been ferrying around humanitarian cargo on contract with the Afghan government, local media reported. The pilots say they had verbal permission from Tajik air traffic controllers to land and refuel in Kurgan-Tyube. But when that permission was suddenly denied, they lacked enough fuel to return to Kabul and landed anyway—as normal international conventions governing air traffic allow. 

The Russian Foreign Ministry called the sentences “extremely severe” and “politically charged,” and warned that the case would harm Tajik-Russian relations, state-run RIA Novosti reported.

Relations between Moscow and Dushanbe have been rocky for years. President Emomali Rakhmon was reportedly angered in 2007 when Moscow abruptly withdrew financial support for his pet project, the giant hydropower plant at Rogun, designed to be the world’s tallest. 

Irking Moscow, Rakhmon regularly seeks rent for Russia’s 201st Motorized Rifle Division and has obstructed Moscow’s attempts to return guards to the porous, drug-addled border with Afghanistan (through which that heroin is heading to Russia). To quiet him, Russian officials threaten to impose visa restrictions on Tajik migrant workers—an effective trump card since Tajikistan depends on their remittances for approximately 40 percent of its GDP.

Central Asia watcher Alexei Grozin of the CIS Institute in Moscow says Dushanbe might be using the pilots as hostages to blackmail the Kremlin.

"Bargaining between Moscow and Dushanbe on various issues continues," Grozin told Kommersant. "It’s possible this [the harsh court sentence] is done in anticipation of the signing, scheduled for spring, of agreements on the Russian military base … and Russian-Tajik economic partnership.”