High Irish GDP is an illusion, Ireland is not that rich

You are, yeah.

As far as the Russians concerned, these planes belong to Russia (or to Russian companies).

As far as the rest of the world is concerned, they don't.

Which means, if the plane flies outside of Russia, or perhaps a few client states of Russia, it's at risk of arrest and seizure. So the plane is immediately limited to domestic flights, which makes it considerably less useful to Russia.

Russia will also find it difficult to get spare parts for a stolen plane or its engines, almost impossible to get it serviced and completely impossible to get it certified. For a civil airliner, that's a huge problem. In some relatively short period of time, the plane will become unflyable. Just how short that period is depends on your appetite for risk. (I don't mean financial or legal risk here; I mean the risk of dying in a fireball.)

There are temporary workarounds. If you have enough planes/engines of the same make and model, you can cannibalize some of them for parts for others, but this offers limited benefits — if a part is due for replacement after 1,000 hrs flying time, and you replace it with a second-hand part that has already accrued 800 hrs, that only gets you another 200 hrs. Your can use knockoff parts from dodgy Chinese sources, but your insurance immediately lapses. You can use non-authorised engineers for servicing, but you have the same insurance problem. Flying uninsured aircraft creates financial problems for Russian airlines, and for the banks that finance them. The Russian government can step in and provide financial guarantees at the taxpayer's expense, but the Russian government has its own financial pressures, what with funding a war while tax receipts are plummeting and nobody will lend to you. And there's no way round the certification problem.

So, basically, stealing the planes allows you to use them in your domestic aviation market for a while, but not a very long while.

International aviation depends on a transnationally-functioning system of aircraft registration and regulation. It's Russia that is departing from that, not "the West". Countries not aligned with the West still want to participate in international aviation. These stolen aircraft will not be safe outside Russia and a very few client states. They certainly would be liable to arrest in China or India.

(Think about it; aviation leasing companies won't want to lease aircraft to Chinese or Indian airlines if they can't recover those aircraft, should the terms of the lease be violated. So both India and China do indeed have legal mechanisms in place under which an owner of an aircraft can arrest and recover it. If the stolen planes are flown into China or India, what would stop the owners from utilising those mechanisms? You think China and India are going to repeal their laws on this topic, effectively licencing aircraft piracy, and freeze themselves out of international aviation in order to toady to Vladimir Putin? Think again; China has in fact already expressly prohibited the stolen aircraft from being flown into China, and I suspect the only reason India hasn't done so is because Russia hasn't attempted to fly them in.)

Russia can indeed make aircraft parts, but the insurance, financing and certification for civil airliners all depend on the consistent use of authorised parts. (As in, authorised by the manufacturers.) So, if any of the seized aircraft/engines have been manufactured by Russian manufacturers, there's no problem about parts. But anything by Airbus, Boeing, GE Aviation, Rolls-Royce, etc — the parts problem is a huge one. And, as of 2022, 70% of the civil aircraft in Russia were foreign-made, and they accounted for 95% of Russian civil air traffic.

You seem to have a quaint notion that if things are manufactured outside the US, the manufacturers can't control quality. I think that's fairly offensive to countries that aren't the US; it's also untrue. The point about Russian knockoff parts is not that they will be of poor quality — they need not be — but that they aren't the authorised parts, so we don't know what the quality is, and so the aircraft don't meet certification requirements. So even if the plane isn't arrested outside Russia on behalf of an owner seeking to recover it, it's liable to be grounded as not properly certified.

As for the risk of actual accident — the Russians could manufacture knockoff but high-quality parts, and they could put their top engineers onto maintenance and servicing of seized civil airliners. But none of that would solve the insurance, certification, etc problems they face and, besides, they do have other demands on their aircraft manufacturing and engineering capacity, what the the war going on an all, so this might not actually be their top priority for allocation of the available resources. Plus, however good the engineers are, they don't have access to the manufacturer's diagnostic software and systems, and they (obviously) don't have the training or experience the manufacturer's service teams have.

So far the Russians have addressed these problems by throwing money at Russian Airlines. Civil aviation traffic (both international and domestic) has fallen sharply and, while the Russian airlines save money by not making their lease payments, they are still mostly insolvent. Russia props them up with massive subsidies — $4.5 billion last year, but it will certainly be higher this year — which is the only thing that keeps them flying, at least domestically.

Well, the planes have been stolen. That's a loss, obviously. But even if the legal action is ineffective to secure immediate recovery of the planes, it may help to deny Russia much of the benefit of stealing them which, if nothing else, reduces the incentive for theft of this kind. And it may do a little more than that; it may position the owners somewhat better to recover the planes if Russian airlines do fly them to another jurisdiction. Also, devaluing the planes to Russia reduces the cost of bargaining to recover them when the war is over. The less the planes are worth to Russia, the less sense it makes for Russia to continue to suffer sanctions by refusing to return the planes and repay the lease costs on which they defaulted.

Will the Russians agree to that? Well, we don't know how the war will end, or when, or whether the planes will have any value to anybody by then. But the owners will want to position themselves to make the best of whatever the situation happens to be, which means doing everything they can to deny the Russians as much benefit as they can from the theft, and to assert and not abandon their own interest in them.

Planes are immensely valuable assets. A new A330 will cost you about US$250 million, depending on whether you want the sunroof, the rear wash/wipe and the go-faster stripes. Obviously, the owner of such an asset is going to be prepared to spend money defending their right to it; if they weren't prepared to to that, they wouldn't — and shouldn't — be in the business.

The disputes will not cost as much as the aircraft; the planes, as pointed out, are massively expensive and the proceedings will be relatively cheap. Russia isn't bothering to enter a defence (because they have no defence) so the plaintiffs will get judgment in default of defence. The cost of that will be measured, at most, in tens of thousands, not hundreds of millions.

Young Irish professionals are emigrating. That`s no mystery.

Yes it is more opportune for them to go than is is to stay, given the cost of housing.

That is a very good picture.

In four of the six we are better than the European average. Need to do better in renewable energy and organic farming.