companies were engaged in carrying passengers over Russia's inland waterways; they transported 22.8 million passengers, the total volume of river passenger transportation being 841.1 million passenger-km. Black Sea and Sea of Azov Novorossiysk, Rostov-on-Don, Sochi, Tuapse, Yeysk. Baltic Sea Baltiysk, Kaliningrad, Primorsk, St. Petersburg, Vyborg, Vysotsk. White Sea, Barents Sea, and other seas of Arctic Ocean Arkhangelsk, Dudinka, Igarka, Murmansk, Tiksi, Vitino. Seas of Pacific Ocean Kholmsk, Magadan, Nakhodka Vostochny Port, Nevelsk, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Vanino, Vladivostok Caspian Sea Astrakhan, Makhachkala. Pipelines Russia is home to the world's longest oil pipeline, the Druzhba pipeline and in fact one of the biggest oil pipeline networks in the world. It carries oil some from the eastern part of the European Russia to points in Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Germany. The network also branches out into numerous pipelines to deliver its product throughout Eastern Europe and beyond. The name "Druzhba" means "friendship", alluding to the fact that the pipeline supplied oil to the energy-hungry western regions of the Soviet Union, to its "fraternal socialist allies" in the former Soviet bloc, and to western Europe. Today, it is the largest principal artery for the transportation of Russian (and Kazakh) oil across Europe. On 29 October 2012 president Vladimir Putin instructed the general manager of Gazprom to start the construction of the pipeline. On 21 May 2014, Russia and China signed a 30-years gas deal which was need to make the project feasible. Construction was launched on 1 September 2014 in Yakutsk by president Putin and Chinese deputy premier minister Zhang Gaoli. Air transport As of 2002, there were 2,743 airports in Russia. Between 2013 and 2022, the Russian government subsidized around 140 domestic air routes covering 12 airports. The subsidies are managed by Rosaviatsia and cover the Crimea, Kaliningrad and Far East regions of Russia. Aircraft manufacturing is an important industrial sector in Russia, employing around 355,300 people. The dissolution of the Soviet Union led to a deep crisis for the industry, especially for the civilian aircraft segment. The situation started improving during the middle of the first decade of the 2000s due to growth in air transportation and increasing demand. A consolidation programme launched in 2005 led to the creation of the United Aircraft Corporation holding company, which includes most of the industry's key companies. According to the Federal State Statistics Service of the Russian Federation, as of 2012, there