Here's some good news potentially for everybody who must fly across Russia for an adoption journey: Russia has announced plans to repair and improve 16 regional airports.

According to a report earlier this month in Kommersant, the Moscow regional government has earmarked up to 55 billion roubles ($2.13 billion) for the upgrades and plans to begin work almost immediately. Almost all of the airports to be affected are in western Russian and the plan seems tied to the overhaul now underway at Vnukovo International Airport, which is owned by the Moscow government. All of the work will be completed within three years.

Vnukovo is one of the three airports that serve Moscow. Since 2003, it has been undergoing a complete transformation that includes two new terminals and a direct rail link to Moscow's Kiev railway station, which helps travelers bypass Moscow's often choked ring roads. Its runways are also being lengthened and equipped with better instrument landing systems.

The sixteen airports include two of the so-called Golden Ring cities close to Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod and Kostroma, and Volgograd, which is slightly south of Moscow. Also on the list are the northwestern cities of Ivanovo and Petrozavodsk, and Kursk and Belgorod to the west of Moscow. Then there is a cluster of cities in southern portion of European Russia: Bryansk, Lipetsk, Kaluga, Oryol, Ulyanovsk and Voronezh to the west and Tambov to the southeast. The farthest southern city affected by the plan is Orenburg and it will also target one airport in Siberia, that of Kurgan. The Kommersant story does not say what kind of work will be done in each city.

Why these 16 cities? According to the report in Kommersant, some sources are speculating that the move is being done to boost passenger traffic for Atlant-Soyuz Airlines, in which the Moscow government also owns a stake. The entry for Atlant-Soyuz in Wikipedia indicates that the carrier now serves only a handful of cities in Russia with passenger flights, with the bulk of its traffic being cargo and charter. Atlant-Soyuz does, however, serve Sochi, the Krasnodar region city that was chosen last month as the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics.