A Flanker team at Kubinka

The Russian Knights were formed at Kubinka, west of Moscow, within what is now the 237th Guards Aviation Equipment Demonstration Centre. The team’s own history traces group flying on the Sukhoi Su-27 to May 1989 and takes 5 April 1991 as its official birthday. The first aircraft were three single-seat Su-27s and three two-seat Su-27UBs. Unlike Western display teams, the Knights remain a combat unit: their pilots hold front-line qualifications and usually practise formation work only in the days before a show. The jets carry no smoke generators, and the team flies a red, white and blue livery.

The first Soviet jets in the West

In 1991 the Knights were among the first Soviet jets to display in the West. The team site dates its first foreign show to Poznań, Poland, on 24 August 1991; other accounts give RAF Scampton, home of the Red Arrows, in September 1991 as the first Western display. A North American tour followed in June 1992, and the Knights appeared at LIMA in Malaysia in 1991 and 1993 and at Zhuhai in 1998. The team has displayed in more than fifteen countries, including the Netherlands, Belgium, Slovakia, Finland and the United Arab Emirates.

Cam Ranh, 1995

The team’s worst day came on 12 December 1995. Flying in formation behind an Il-76 transport on approach to Cam Ranh in Vietnam, in poor weather, the three aircraft on the right side of the formation, two Su-27s and a Su-27UB, struck a mountain and four pilots were killed. Wikipedia attributes the accident to a misreading of the approach instructions; the aerobaticteams.net history says the Il-76 led the formation into high ground in dense fog.

Kubinka Diamond and the 2009 collision

From 2003 the Knights began flying regularly with the MiG-29 team Swifts, also from Kubinka. A ten-aircraft joint formation flew in March 2003 and the mixed nine-ship “Kubinka Diamond” followed, with a horizontal barrel roll by nine aircraft in 2007. On 16 August 2009, rehearsing for MAKS at Zhukovsky, the Su-27 of the team commander, Guards Colonel Igor Tkachenko, collided with his wingman’s aircraft. Tkachenko was killed, the other two pilots ejected, and debris set houses alight. On 9 June 2016 Major Sergei Yeremenko died when his Su-27 crashed near Moscow after a flypast.

Su-30SM, Su-35S and the war

The Knights moved to the Sukhoi Su-30SM in 2016–2017 and received four new Su-35S fighters at Kubinka on 12 November 2019. They now fly a mix of both types; in November 2024 they took six Su-35S and one Su-30SM to Airshow China at Zhuhai. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine the team’s combat role has become visible: Ukrainian sources reported a Knights Su-35S destroyed in a drone strike in May 2025, and Norway’s armed forces published images in early 2026 of an armed Knights Su-35S escorting Tu-95 bombers over the Barents Sea.