Traffic in Russia is heavily concentrated: Sheremetyevo International Airport (SVO) alone handles about 43.7 million passengers a year, roughly 65% of the 67 million across the 4 airports listed here. That pattern is typical of a country with one dominant hub carrier feeding a single gateway.
Between them these airports operate 8 runways serving 3 cities, and the country spans 2 time zones, so a domestic flight here can change your watch. Every airport below links to a live map of aircraft observed within available ADS-B coverage around the field.
The next airport in the ranking is Pulkovo Airport (LED) at about 20.5 million passengers. The gap to SVO is 23.2 million, while the three busiest airports account for roughly 100% of traffic represented by this list. Most listed traffic is therefore concentrated at the top of the network.
The airports are spread across roughly 16 degrees of latitude and 102 degrees of longitude. That geographic spread makes weather, daylight and local operating conditions materially different across the same national network. Field elevations vary less dramatically than they do in the world's mountain-airport networks. The average across this selected set is 2.0 runways per airport.
Read airport by airport, the selected Russia network is not interchangeable: Sheremetyevo International Airport (SVO) has 3 runways and about 43.7 million annual passengers, Pulkovo Airport (LED) has 2 runways and about 20.5 million annual passengers, Vladivostok International Airport (VVO) has 2 runways and about 3.1 million annual passengers and Zhukovsky International Airport (ZIA) has 1 runway and no comparable traffic figure. Those differences matter when comparing a live map. A larger passenger total indicates schedule scale, while runway count describes physical layout; neither number by itself proves how delayed, connected or operationally efficient an airport will be on a particular day.
With 4 gateways in this data cut, the Russia hierarchy is readable directly: SVO contributes 65% of the represented passenger total, LED contributes 31% of the represented passenger total, VVO contributes 5% of the represented passenger total and ZIA contributes 0% of the represented passenger total. That makes SVO the first gateway here without reducing LED to a minor field, since its traffic is about 47% of SVO's.
The physical ranking differs from the traffic ranking: SVO has 3 listed runways, LED has 2 listed runways, VVO has 2 listed runways and ZIA has 1 listed runway. SVO is the highest of the group at 622 ft, against 46 ft at VVO. Those facts describe layout and setting, not a live capacity forecast; weather, active runway configuration and traffic flow still decide what a viewer sees on the map at a given hour.