Military flying at Kant began with a refugee school. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the Odessa Military Aviation School was evacuated to Kyrgyzstan, and Wikipedia records that it turned out 1,507 pilots during the war, seven of whom became Heroes of the Soviet Union. In 1947 it was renamed the Frunze Military Aviation School for Pilots, after the city now called Bishkek, and a training aviation regiment was formed in 1951–1952.

From 1956 the school took foreign students, and that is where Kant’s unusual reputation comes from. Wikipedia names Egypt’s future president Hosni Mubarak, Syria’s Hafez al-Assad and India’s Air Chief Marshal Dilbagh Singh among its graduates. In 1959 the regiment passed to the 5th Central Courses for Preparation and Improvement of Aviation Personnel, the Soviet Union’s school for foreign military aviators. TechInformPress says the 322nd regiment formed at Kant that year on MiG-15s; ww2.dk has it at Kant from 1952, with a question mark, and lists MiG-17s and finally MiG-21bis. An L-39 squadron from the 349th regiment in Kazakhstan flew here too.

By 1992, TechInformPress counts, the Courses had trained 21,682 specialists from 54 countries. Kyrgyzstan still marks Military Aviation Day on 18 August, dating it from the 1959 regiment; at the 52nd anniversary in 2011, RFE/RL’s Azattyk reported, staff of the Russian base at Kant and of the US Transit Center at Manas both came.

On 1 January 1992, ww2.dk records, the Kant regiment was taken over by Kyrgyzstan. The people did not stay with it: TechInformPress says most of the permanent staff and the training equipment of the 5th Central Courses moved to Kurgan in Russia that year. What remained was a large fleet of MiG-21s, L-39s and helicopters and a small new state with no money to fly them.

Much of it was sold, but much stayed on the ground. TechInformPress counted 46 MiG-21s at Kant in 2006, all of them in storage, and by mid-2019 two An-26s and two Mi-24s were stored there as well. Which airfield the new Kyrgyz air arm really flew from is less clear than it sounds: ww2.dk says the Kyrgyz successor unit moved from Kant to Frunze-1 in Bishkek in 2003, while English Wikipedia’s article on the Armed Forces says all military aircraft are at Kant.

The United States opened its base at Manas, on the other side of Bishkek, on 16 December 2001. Russia answered at Kant. Wikipedia dates the bilateral agreement to 22 September 2003 and the official opening to 23 October 2003, and calls it the first new air base Russia had opened abroad since 1991; a 2013 report by the US Congressional Research Service instead dates the basing agreement to 2002, with rent of 4.5 million dollars a year. TechInformPress says the base opened with one squadron of Su-25s and one of Mi-8s.

Moscow presents Kant as part of the CSTO’s collective forces, and the CRS wrote that it operates as part of that alliance. The same report records the official purpose, to combat regional terrorism and defend CIS borders, and adds its own judgement that the base was also meant to counter US and NATO influence. It put the Russian contingent at about 500 in early 2013, when about 1,500 US troops and contractors were at Manas.

On 20 September 2012 Vladimir Putin and Almazbek Atambayev signed an agreement on a joint Russian military base in Kyrgyzstan for 15 years from 2017, according to Wikipedia’s article on Kyrgyz–Russian relations; its Kant article adds a five-year automatic extension option and says Russia wrote off 500 million dollars of Kyrgyz debt. The CRS reported that the rent stayed unchanged. A separate military-technical agreement, Wikipedia says, was worth about 1 billion dollars in Russian arms.

TechInformPress counted 15 Russian Su-25s and two Mi-8s at Kant in mid-2019. As of February 2023, Wikipedia lists Su-25SM attack aircraft, Mi-8MTV-5-1 helicopters, Orlan-10 drones and military police and traffic police units. Wikipedia’s list of Russian bases abroad gives the base the military unit number 20022, and its article on the 14th Air and Air Defence Forces Army puts it directly under that army. These are Russian aircraft: the Su-25s that flew at Kyrgyzstan’s own 60th anniversary air parade in August 2019 were not Kyrgyz, because Kyrgyzstan has none.