Ukrainian Il-76 spotted leaving Saudi airport near Yemen

A Ukrainian Air Force Il-76MD heavy transport aircraft was tracked on Oct. 12 flying out of Sharurah, a Saudi town in Najran Province near the border with Yemen, in a rare appearance of a Ukrainian military cargo plane in the south of the kingdom.

Flight-tracking data shared by the open-source account Egypt’s Intel Observer shows the four-engine jet, registration 76661, heading north over the Red Sea at about 10,350 m (33,975 feet) at 17:28 UTC on its way from Sharurah to Istanbul’s Sabiha Gökçen airport, roughly an hour and 48 minutes after takeoff. The account said the aircraft had earlier flown to Sharurah from Lviv in western Ukraine, a leg not visible in the published screenshot.

Neither Kyiv nor Riyadh has said what the aircraft carried or why it landed at Sharurah. The open-source account speculated that it may have delivered Ukrainian interceptor drones or military specialists, possibly to support Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces, and described Sharurah as their main supply hub, a claim that has not been confirmed by any government.

Sharurah’s airport serves both civilian and military traffic and sits close to the Yemeni frontier. It was one of seven southern airports Saudi Arabia shut to civilian flights in March 2015, when the kingdom began its air campaign against the Iran-aligned Houthi movement in Yemen.

Ukraine already has a documented military footprint in the Gulf. After Iran launched drone and missile strikes on Gulf states during the war that began in March 2026, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine had sent more than 200 counter-drone specialists to the region, and later put the number at 228 across five partners, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Jordan. Zelensky signed a defense agreement with Saudi Arabia during a Gulf visit in the spring, and Ukrainian officials have offered partners interceptor drones built to bring down Iranian-designed Shahed attack drones.

According to information obtained by The Defence Blog, Ukrainian specialists are helping Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region defend against hostile drone strikes, and are also training local forces in new tactics for employing attack drones.

That work has drawn threats from Tehran. In March, an Iranian member of parliament said Ukraine’s support to Gulf states made it Iran’s “legitimate war target.”

The Il-76MD is a Soviet-designed strategic airlifter able to carry about 40 tonnes (88,000 pounds) of cargo, and the Ukrainian Air Force operates only a small number of them. Ukrainian military Il-76 flights abroad are usually tied to cargo pickups, equipment deliveries or the movement of personnel.

The routing through Istanbul fits a flight path north over the Red Sea and Turkey back toward Ukraine, though the tracking data does not show the aircraft’s final destination after Sabiha Gökçen or whether it returned empty.

What the aircraft unloaded or picked up at Sharurah, and whether the flight was linked to Ukraine’s counter-drone mission in Saudi Arabia or to the conflict in Yemen, remains unconfirmed.