Bezmer lies in the Upper Thracian lowland about 10 kilometres west of Yambol, between the villages of Bezmer and Bolyarsko, according to English Wikipedia and the Sofia Globe. Its unit is older than the airfield. The air force says the 22nd Fighter Air Regiment was formed at Graf Ignatievo on 5 October 1951, equipped with 24 Yakovlev Yak-23 jets, part of the rapid build-up of a Soviet-model air force in the early 1950s.

The regiment did not arrive at Bezmer straight away. The official history says it trained at the airfield near Tolbukhin, today’s Dobrich, until 5 April 1955, and was then rebased to the newly built airfield near the village of Bezmer. Deliveries of MiG-15s began in September 1955 and MiG-17s followed in 1958. The regiment was later a fighter-bomber unit: by 1993 the air force calls it the 22nd Fighter-Bomber Air Regiment.

Sources differ on when the field itself was first used. English Wikipedia’s articles on Ravnets and Graf Ignatievo say the 15th Fighter Air Regiment was moved to Bezmer on 14 April 1952 and on to the new Ravnets airfield four months later, which would put an earlier strip here three years before the air force’s “newly built” airfield of 1955. We have not found an official account of that 1952 stay, so both are given here.

The regiment’s great change came in the late 1980s. The air force records the first Sukhoi Su-25s arriving at Bezmer on 15 September 1986; English Wikipedia says the type entered service in 1988, when 40 Su-25K and two-seat Su-25UBK aircraft were delivered in the strike and reconnaissance role. The two dates may reflect a first batch and the completed fleet, but no source we read explains the gap, so both are published.

Bezmer also briefly housed Bulgaria’s last reconnaissance jets. English Wikipedia says the Su-22M-4 and Su-22UM-3K, first stationed at Dobrich, moved to Bezmer before being withdrawn in February 2004, the year Bulgaria joined NATO. During the Warsaw Pact exercise Shield-82, held in Bulgaria in 1982, 18 MiG-21MFs from Graf Ignatievo deployed to Shtraklevo and later to Bezmer, according to the same encyclopedia.

As the post-1989 air force shrank, the regiment became the 22nd Attack Air Base on 1 September 1993. On 1 June 2008 it was downgraded to a forward deployment base, and on 1 December 2021 it became simply the 22nd Air Base. Its official task today is direct air support and countering opposing forces for national and allied components, receiving allied forces, and helping the population in disasters.

By 2018 the Su-25 fleet was worn out. The government approved overhaul projects for MiG-29s and Su-25s in November 2018 and a payment of 82.5 million leva for the Su-25 work in February 2019. The contractor was Belarus’s 558th Aircraft Repair Plant, but the Sofia Globe reported that the money came back because of the correspondent bank’s policy, and that arms sanctions imposed on Belarus in 2004 complicated the deal.

In June 2019 the Speaker of Parliament returned from Moscow proposing that Russian engineers join an overhaul at Bulgaria’s Avionams plant. Defence Minister Krassimir Karakachanov rejected it, saying only four of the 14 Su-25s were operational. On 28 August 2019 the first aircraft was dismantled at Bezmer and flown in an Il-76 to Baranovichi; eight were overhauled there. Fleet size is itself disputed: 12 in one Sofia Globe report, 14 in two others, and 7 listed by English Wikipedia today.

The Su-25 has no named successor. For 2026 the government budgeted 27.6 million leva to keep it flying, and Defence Minister Atanas Zapryanov told Parliament in November 2025 that retiring the MiG-29 and Su-25 before the F-16 reaches initial operational readiness would deprive the air force of key capabilities. He also said no new Su-25 or MiG-29 pilots had been trained in the previous five years.

The biggest single investment in the base’s history was inaugurated on 27 March 2016 in the presence of Prime Minister Boiko Borissov and Defence Minister Nikolai Nenchev. The two-year project cost 62 million leva, about 31.7 million euro, and close to 55 million leva came from NATO, with the rest from the Bulgarian defence budget. Nenchev thanked Bulgaria’s NATO allies for the financial support, and the Sofia Globe tied the project to the 2006 agreement with the United States on joint use of Bulgarian military facilities.

The runway was lengthened from 2,500 to 3,000 metres, given 150-metre turning arcs at each end and widened to 60 metres with safety strips, bringing the field to NATO standards for strategic transport aircraft. Su-25s flew demonstration passes at the ceremony; the Sofia Globe reported that the attack jets would be relocating to the base, without saying where they had operated during the works.

English Wikipedia gives the runway as 12/30 and the elevation as 155 metres and lists ICAO code LBIA, but none of these appears in an official source we could reach, and the military aerodrome is not published in the civil AIP. The long runway has since shaped the base’s second career: it now hosts allied transport aircraft far larger than anything its own Su-25 squadron flies, from USAFE C-130s in Thracian Summer 2023 to the European Spartan exercise of 2025 and the ETAR-S 26-3 airlift course that opened on 28 September 2026.

Bezmer is one of the Bulgarian-American joint military facilities created by the defence cooperation agreement with the United States, alongside the Novo Selo training range and, English Wikipedia says, Graf Ignatievo. Most sources date the agreement to 2006; the Wikipedia article on Bulgarian-US relations dates the Rice–Kalfin signature to December 2005. The facilities remain Bulgarian: the 22nd Air Base is a Bulgarian unit, and no US Air Force unit is permanently stationed at Bezmer.

What the US brings is rotations and exercises. In Thracian Summer 2023, from 5 to 20 August, three C-130s of US Air Forces in Europe flew with Bulgarian Spartans from Bezmer and Cheshnegirovo, dropping cargo and paratroopers for special forces; the Sofia Globe noted more than 15 years of such joint training. In April 2024 Bezmer personnel practised controlling simulated attacks by US Air Force B-1 bombers based at Morón in Spain.

Thracian Viper 2024 involved six F-16s of the US 31st Fighter Wing from Aviano, Italy, and up to three C-130s; the Sofia Globe reported that the allied jets would work in Bulgarian airspace without landing in the country. English Wikipedia says US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin visited the base on 18 March 2022, which we have not confirmed from a US source.

Bezmer’s joint-use status became front-page news in July 2026. US Air Force tankers had been at Sofia Airport from February to June; Prime Minister Roumen Radev refused to extend that stay and offered military airfields instead. On 20 July he said the US embassy had asked, under the 2006 agreement, to base up to eight refuelling aircraft at Bezmer, which the agreement designates a facility for joint use.

Parliament approved on 22 July by 136 votes to 13, with two abstentions: up to eight KC-135 Stratotankers and 250 US personnel, from 24 July to 1 October 2026. Radev said it was “categorically ruled out” that combat operations in the Middle East would be conducted from Bulgarian territory, and that the tankers would operate outside Bulgarian airspace. The US unit supplying the tankers was not named in the reports we read.

Iran warned Sofia on 21 July and again on 27 July that Bulgaria’s decision-makers must bear responsibility. On 19 August the Financial Times reported that Iran was considering attacks on bases supporting the US and named Bezmer; Radev spoke to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte the next day, and the interior minister said security at the base was adequate. Bulgaria’s security services had reported no direct threat.