The flat ground south-east of Šiauliai was first used for air warfare by the German army, which built hangars for its Zeppelin airships here in 1916–1917, according to English Wikipedia. When independent Lithuania needed a second air base, it chose the same place. The armed forces’ own history dates the Žokniai military aviation base to 1 August 1931, with Major Leonardas Peseckas as its commander. Wikipedia adds that it was built for the 3rd, 4th and 5th squadrons, with room for 35 aircraft — a large share of an air arm that counted 117 aircraft in mid-1940.

What turned Zokniai into a major airfield was war and occupation. Wikipedia says concrete runways were laid under German occupation in 1943, and that after the war the Soviet forces took the base over and, by 1957, built two parallel runways of about 3.5 and 3.2 kilometres for the Ilyushin Il-28 jet bomber, making it one of only six Soviet bases able to handle the Myasishchev M-4 strategic bomber. The Soviet units stationed here in the following decades were not confirmed in the sources checked and are not named on this page.

Those Soviet runways are the base’s inheritance. The Lithuanian AIP lists runway 14L/32R at 3,500 by 45 metres and 14R/32L at 3,244 by 32 metres, with an aerodrome elevation of 447 feet. They are the reason NATO could put fighters, tankers and AWACS aircraft here from the first day, and the reason the civil side of the airport can take Boeing 747 freighters.

The Lithuanian unit at Šiauliai is the Aviation Base (Aviacijos bazė). It counts its birthday from 12 June 1992, when an An-2 with the Vytis double cross on its wings took off from Barysiai airfield, the first flight of the restored air force. After 1 March 1993 it became the First Aviation Base of the Lithuanian Air Force, and between 1995 and 1999 it moved to Zokniai, according to Wikipedia; a second air base at Pajuostis near Panevėžys closed in 2007. The civil side of the airfield received international airport status in 1994.

The base’s official tasks are to keep the military aerodrome working, to take part in air policing with other units, to provide search and rescue for all users of Lithuanian airspace — a task the government gave the air force on 24 January 1996 — and to give host nation support to NATO and EU forces. It has a headquarters, a Flight Safety Division, an Air Operations Group and an Operations Support Group, with detached rescue posts at Kaunas and Nemirsetė. The Armament and Equipment Repair Depot opened on 1 October 2004. Wikipedia put the airport’s military and civilian staff at about 400 in 2020.

Its aircraft are transports and helicopters. The first of three C-27J Spartans landed at Šiauliai on 22 December 2006; the others followed in 2008 and 2009. Two L-410s, a German gift of 1992, three AS365N3+ Dauphins, the first of which arrived on 2 June 2015, and Mi-8s complete the list on the official page, and Wikipedia adds two UH-60M Black Hawks of four ordered in 2020. The L-39 jets that once flew national air policing tasks from here were retired; the last went to Ukraine on 20 April 2024.

Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia joined NATO on 29 March 2004 without a single fighter between them. The Alliance’s answer was to lend them some. At 16:47 that day four Belgian F-16s landed at Šiauliai, according to the Lithuanian defence ministry; NATO and Wikipedia give 30 March. The commander of that first detachment, Harold Van Pee, was back in March 2024 as a major general commanding the Combined Air Operations Centre that runs the mission, and he remembered a base that had to be built in days.

Wikipedia’s rotation table, used here as a finding aid, shows how many air forces have passed through. Danish F-16s followed the Belgians on 1 July 2004, then Norwegians and Dutch; United States F-16CJs arrived in October 2005, Polish MiG-29s in January 2006, Turkish F-16s later that year and Romanian MiG-21 LanceRs in 2007. American F-15Cs, Czech Gripens, French Mirage 2000s and six German F-4F Phantoms in 2011 all stood alert here. Later came Hungarian Gripens, Typhoons from Britain, Italy and Spain, Spanish Hornets and French Rafales.

For ten years Šiauliai was the only base. In 2014 a second detachment was added at Ämari in Estonia, and NATO says Lielvārde in Latvia has also been able to host its aircraft since 2024. By the 20th anniversary ceremony on 28 March 2024, when the symbolic Baltic airspace key passed from Belgian and French commanders to Spanish and Portuguese ones, the mission had reached its 64th rotation, covering the airspace 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

It is easy to misread Šiauliai as a Lithuanian fighter base. It is not. The fighters on quick reaction alert belong to the visiting ally of the moment and fly under NATO command; Lithuania provides the runway, the hangars, fuel, security and the national air surveillance picture. In September 2026 the allied unit was an Italian Air Force detachment of about 200 people with four Eurofighter Typhoons, which took over on 31 July 2026 — Italy’s sixth deployment to Šiauliai and eleventh to the Baltic states, the ministry says. Before it, four French Rafales with about 110 people and six Romanian F-16s with about 100 had shared the duty.

Everything else on the military side is Lithuanian: the Aviation Base with its transports and rescue helicopters, the repair depot, and the base’s own air traffic and support services. The ministry is also expanding the allied side of the airfield. On 4 June 2025 it announced that the government had approved the development of a military infrastructure lot of about 17 hectares at Šiauliai to accommodate allied units, paid for from the national budget and the NATO Security Investment Programme; the sum for Šiauliai was not published.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine changed the tempo. From 28 November 2024 French Rafales joined the Italian Typhoons at Šiauliai, giving the detachment eight fighters for four months. At the handover the defence ministry’s Defence Policy Director, Vaidotas Urbelis, said the mission had never been so important, pointing to hybrid attacks, provocations and sabotage. The ministry publishes weekly scramble data: its report of 3 December 2024 counted two scrambles, against a Russian Su-24MR on 29 November and an An-72 on 30 November; in the week of 21–27 September 2026 the detachments were alerted six times.

In 2026 the job changed. NATO states that during the year it moved from Baltic Air Policing to a wider air defence posture, still built on four-month rotations but with additional allied assets; the Lithuanian ministry says the transition was agreed at the Alliance’s Ankara summit. The detachments that left Šiauliai on 31 July 2026 had already fought a new kind of target: the ministry records that Romanian airmen shot down a drone over Estonia and the French one over Latvia. The dates of those engagements were not given in the source and are not given here.