Pulkovo Airport

Pulkovo Airport is the primary aviation gateway of Saint Petersburg and the third-busiest airport in Russia after Moscow-Sheremetyevo and Moscow-Domodedovo — ranked by BigAirports as the dominant airport of northwestern Russia and the Baltic approaches. Located 23 km south of central Saint Petersburg at 78 ft (24 m) elevation, LED handles roughly 20M passengers annually through a single unified terminal (Pulkovo-1, reopened 2014) designed by Grimshaw Architects with a distinctive folded-plate roof structure that evokes the local winter palace and industrial traditions of the city. Two parallel runways — 10R/28L at 12,402 ft (3,780 m) and 10L/28R at 11,146 ft (3,397 m) — support the operation, both of concrete construction and dimensioned for fully loaded wide-body departures. The 2014 terminal consolidated the previous Pulkovo-1 domestic and Pulkovo-2 international buildings into a single 150,000-square-meter structure with 88 check-in counters, 14 contact gates with jetbridges and 7 remote stands. A planned second terminal would lift system capacity from the current 22M toward 35M passengers. LED's 146 routes to 87 destinations across 37 airlines reflect a network weighted heavily toward domestic Russia — Aeroflot, Rossiya (St. Petersburg-based), S7, Ural, Red Wings, Smartavia and Pobeda all serve major Russian cities including Moscow, Kazan, Ekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Sochi, Kaliningrad, Vladivostok and Khabarovsk — alongside a reshaped international layer focused on Turkey, UAE, Central Asia, Caucasus, Serbia and friendly Asian markets. Turkish Airlines, flydubai, Qatar Airways, Air Serbia, Belavia, Uzbekistan Airways, Air Astana, FlyArystan and Azerbaijan Airlines operate scheduled service. Western European and North American service has been curtailed since 2022; the international map now routes primarily via Istanbul, Dubai and Belgrade.