 Russia uses Putin's air fleet to return soldiers killed in Ukraine. Russia's presidential air fleet is quietly repatriating the bodies of soldiers killed in Ukraine and sending them to local morgues in small numbers to prevent public backlash. The Moscow Times Russian Service reported citing flight-tracking data, morgues workers and the soldiers' relatives. Russia Airlines, a subsidiary of the state-owned Aeroflot Group, operates 68 jets and helicopters for the Kremlin that include Russia's equivalent of Air Force One. State media in the Central Russian Republic of Tatarstan filmed one of the jets a TU-134A3 airliner with the registration number RA65911 returning the region's first dead soldier on March 2, 2022. President Vladimir Putin had flown on a plane with the same RA65911 tail number to a neighbouring Russian region in 2016 according to a local newspaper that photographed its landing. Flight-tracking tools have spotted several of the Russia aircraft, which form the airline's special flight detachment crossing to and from the Russian regions between January and early February 2023. The Moscow Times has found a correlation between these flights' arrivals and local news coverage of soldiers' funerals that followed. A Russia jet with the RA61720 number landed in the central city of Yekaterinburg on January 23rd followed by reports of a serviceman and the Wagner mercenary being buried there in the next 24 hours. Flight radar then registered RA61720 flying to Yufa, the capital of the neighbouring Republic of Bashkortostan, on January 13th the same day that Putin travelled there. An RA87972 tail number jet landed in the Tatarstan city of Niznekamsk on January 25th with the same AA Yangebeev seen on one of 11 zinc coffins caught on video. A week later Tatar residents posted news of Yangebeev's funeral on social media. The same pattern of presidential aircraft flights followed by soldiers' funerals were observed on January 26th in the northwestern regions of Arkhangelsk and Vologda and between February 8th to 12th in the Orenburg and Chelyabinsk regions, while many Russia aircraft depart from Moscow. Others turn their transponders on over the Lipetsk region which is equidistant from Moscow and the Ukrainian border and the neighbouring Tambov region which is among a handful of Russian territories where wartime flight bands are in effect. It is impossible to establish the exact location where the soldiers' bodies were picked up.