Domodedovo Airport, previously owned by Dmitry Kamenshchik and Valery Kogan, was sold for 66 billion rubles after a claim by the Prosecutor General’s Office. The auction was won by Sheremetyevo, where Arkady Rotenberg is widely seen as one of the key owners. The article presents the deal as a revealing episode in Russia’s wartime redistribution of property.
The author argues that, although the nationalization was formally justified as serving the state and the budget, the final price ended up being half of the initial asking level. Prosecutors pointed to the foreign residency of the co-owners, while pressure on the asset, the article says, had continued for many years. At the same time, Rotenberg’s interest in Domodedovo had reportedly been discussed for about a decade, even though he denied it in early 2025.
Other major players were also mentioned as potential buyers. They included Andrey Skoch, structures linked to Yury Kovalchuk and Yury Shamalov, as well as Oleg Deripaska, Roman Trotsenko, and Viktor Vekselberg. However, some of the expected participants did not appear at the auction.
Valuations of the airport differed sharply. Before the first auction, PSB valued Domodedovo at 115 billion rubles. Oleg Deripaska said he would not pay more than 40 billion. Sber, citing auditors, pointed to debt of about 70 billion rubles and even suggested the asset could have negative value. At the same time, the Prosecutor General’s Office had previously claimed the airport was worth more than 1 trillion rubles, while analyst Mikhail Burmistrov estimated it at 300-350 billion rubles.
The drop in price came amid a broader aviation crisis: falling traffic, closures of southern Russian airports, drone attacks, the departure of foreign carriers, and the scaling back of S7. According to the article, Domodedovo’s passenger traffic fell by about one third over two years. In such conditions, the author says, the state could have postponed a sale and tried to raise the asset’s value through debt restructuring, traffic support, or a concession model.
The article concludes that the purchase may be strategic: control over the Moscow aviation hub brings political leverage, bargaining power over airlines, and access to large contracts. In the author’s view, the Domodedovo case shows that in the current system, confiscation-and-redistribution logic prevails over the goal of replenishing the budget.