Ukraine Denied Russia This Airport on Day One

Antonov Airport at Hostomel is a cargo field twenty-five kilometers northwest of central Kyiv, built to handle the widest aircraft ever made.

It housed the Antonov design bureau and its flagship An-225 Mriya, the six-engine, 640-ton dream of Soviet aviation.

On the morning of February 24, 2022, at roughly 11:00 a.m., a formation of about thirty-four Russian helicopters, Ka-52 gunships escorting Mi-8 transports, appeared low over the reservoir north of the runway.

Aboard were roughly two hundred elite VDV airborne troops from the 31st Guards Air Assault Brigade.

Their mission was to seize the airport intact and open an air corridor for the Il-76 transport fleet, which would land waves of paratroopers within striking distance of the government quarter in central Kyiv.

CIA director William Burns had briefed Volodymyr Zelensky in January that the Kremlin intended to use Hostomel as the key to a decapitation strike on the capital.

The Ukrainian National Guard's 4th Rapid Reaction Brigade, based nearby, had prepared.

As the helicopters approached, Ukrainian air defense opened up.

Multiple aircraft were shot down.

The VDV landed anyway, secured the tower, and dug in around the runway.

By afternoon a Ukrainian counter-attack by the 4th Brigade, the 72nd Mechanized, and artillery from the Ukrainian Ground Forces was cratering the runway and pinning the paratroopers under fire.

Russian ground forces advancing from Belarus reached the airport on February 25 and, combined with a second airborne wave, took it.

But the runway was unusable.

The Il-76 transports that had been circling toward Ukraine that night were turned back.

The airbridge that was supposed to put thousands of Russian troops on Kyiv's doorstep in the first forty-eight hours never landed a plane.

The Mriya, tail number UR-82060, was destroyed in her hangar on February 27, along with several other Antonov aircraft.

Ukrainian forces retook the ruined airfield on March 31, 2022, as Russia withdrew from the entire Kyiv axis.

The runway is patched now, the terminal shell restored, and Antonov has committed to building a second Mriya from the parts of the original.

The Hostomel airfield museum, rebuilt on the perimeter, marks where a Kyiv decapitation strike stopped, on a runway that never let it take off.