At 7:30 am UTC (1 pm IST, 1:30 pm BST) on November 3, an Antonov-124 cargo aircraft made a smooth landing at Dhaka’s Hazrat Shah Jalal International Airport.
The white-bodied, four-engine plane remained at this airport for an unusually long period of time – almost 12 hours – before it took off at 8:05 pm UTC (1:38 pm IST; 2:08 pm BST).
The destination was Hong Kong where it touched down, before flying over Guangdong in China, at 11:58 pm UTC (5:28 am IST; 5:58 am BST).
Investigations and flight tracking indicated that the An-124 aircraft, whose call sign is UR-82027, is a non-military asset with Ukrainian registration that is used an international cargo transporter.
The unusual part about the aircraft was that earlier the same day, it took off from Baku’s Heydar Aliyev International Airport in Azerbaijan at 2:05 am UTC (7:30 am IST; 8 am BST).
The aircraft then took a southerly direction to fly over either Iraq or Iran before it entered the Persian Gulf where the US military establishment has sufficient naval assets in Bahrain.
The US Navy’s Fifth Fleet operates in the Persian Gulf, Red Sea and Arabian Sea. It is based in Bahrain and has a configuration that includes a Carrier Strike Group and an Amphibious Ready Group or Expeditionary Strike Group.
The An-124 flew over Dubai, passed Muscat, crossed the Arabian Sea before flying past the Karachi-Gujarat coast.
It then swerved southward to fly over Nashik (in Maharashtra), Chhattisgarh, West Bengal and over Bangladesh.
Videos of the plane’s landing at Dhaka airport flooded social media on November 3 afternoon.
Speculations mounted on what the plane might have carried and who at Hazrat Shah Jalal International Airport collected the unidentified consignment.
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Freezing the video to capture the aircraft’s port side, moments before it touched down on the Dhaka airport runway, threw up its registration number – UR-82027. This led to the aircraft’s flight number – ADB341F.
Further inquiries suggested that this plane is registered in Ukraine and is classified as a non-military aircraft.
While this particular An-124 variant is about 35 years old, it has primarily been used for transporting civilian cargo, though in April 2025, it had shipped fuselages of a variant of the US F-16 fighter plane to an American logistics hub at Rzeszów, Poland.
There are some reports that Rzeszów has been used as a centre for sending military aid to Ukraine.
