At Geneva Airport there is an Airbus A321 that has not moved under its own power since February 2022. Registered VP-BOE, the Aeroflot narrowbody landed from Moscow Sheremetyevo on 27 February 2022, days after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It was due to fly back the same day. It never did — and more than four years later it is still sitting on the apron.
The reason is a tangle of sanctions and paperwork. Switzerland, though not an EU member, aligned itself with European measures almost immediately: on 28 February 2022 the Swiss government banned Russian aircraft from taking off from or landing in the country. The A321 was suddenly grounded with no legal route home. It has moved exactly once since — towed in June 2022 to free its parking spot for a United Nations conference, then towed back.
Ownership is what makes the situation so hard to unwind. The jet was not actually Aeroflot's; it was held by Russian state leasing company GTLK through an Irish subsidiary, and that Irish entity has since been pushed into liquidation by sanctions. With the owner in dissolution, the operator sanctioned, and Swiss rules also restricting aviation goods and services to Russian carriers, there is no straightforward repossession path.
The aircraft itself has fared badly. It has received essentially no maintenance since it was parked, and reports describe cracks in the fuselage, engines left uncovered, electrical faults, leftover food on board and a possible rat or insect infestation. Meanwhile the bill keeps climbing: parking charges of around CHF 30,000 a month, potentially approaching $2 million over the years it has sat there.
Geneva's A321 is not an isolated case. In Toronto, Volga-Dnepr's enormous Antonov An-124 freighter (RA-82078) has been at Pearson International since February 2022. Canada went further than Switzerland, formally ordering the freighter seized in June 2023, and the Federal Court rejected the airline's sanctions challenge in a ruling that keeps the aircraft under government control. The key difference: Toronto's An-124 has been legally seized, while Geneva's A321 remains stuck in limbo between sanctions and a collapsing ownership chain.
For VP-BOE, time is working against any recovery. Every month on the ground makes a return to airworthiness more expensive and less plausible, and the most realistic end may be dismantling for spare parts rather than a farewell flight to Moscow. For travellers passing through Geneva, it is a strange piece of visible history — a reminder of how quickly a war redrew the map of international aviation in the winter of 2022, and of the aeroplanes still stranded on the wrong side of it.
Why it matters: even routine trips can cross sanctioned airspace rules and sudden regulatory shifts, and this grounded jet is the most concrete illustration of what that looked like in practice. Aviation-curious visitors to Geneva can see the practical consequences of geopolitics parked in plain sight.
