The 86th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment had fought through the Second World War and served on occupation duty in Germany before it came to Mărculești. English Wikipedia, drawing on the Russian aviation historian Anton Pavlov, says it received MiG-15 jets in 1949 and on 24 October 1951 moved with the 119th Fighter Aviation Division to the airfield in the north of the Moldavian SSR. It converted to the MiG-17 in 1954–1955, to the MiG-21PF in 1964, to the MiG-21PFM in 1966 and to the MiG-21bis in 1974.

The last and most consequential change came in 1989. The first MiG-29 flight at Mărculești took place on 15 June 1989, and on 24 October that year the regiment and its division were transferred from the Soviet Air Forces to the air force of the Black Sea Fleet, becoming a maritime fighter regiment. Wikipedia’s regimental article counts 33 MiG-29s by November 1990. Those figures are Pavlov’s, repeated by Wikipedia, and were not corroborated from an official source.

On 12 April 1992 the regiment came under Moldovan control. According to Wikipedia, most of its non-Moldovan personnel, including all of its pilots and its commander, Colonel Vladimir Koval, left for their home countries. The first Moldovan pilots, Vitalie Rusu and Alexandru Popovici, arrived on 26 May 1992 and were later joined by Sveatoslav Neburac and Alexandru Dărănuţă. On 16 October 1992 the unit became a three-squadron mixed aviation brigade named Decebal.

By then the new air force had flown in anger. English Wikipedia’s Transnistria War article, citing a 1998 account by Tom Cooper and Alexandru Stratulat, says that on 22 June 1992 three MiG-29s took off — from Chișinău, not Mărculești, in that account — to strike the bridge between Bender and Parcani: two carrying six OFAB-250 bombs each and a MiG-29UB as cover. No bomb hit the bridge directly; one fell on a house and, the article says, killed people inside. Russian 14th Army sources claimed a second sortie the next day and a MiG-29 shot down by an S-125 missile; Moldovan authorities denied that sortie took place.

A fighter regiment was more than the new state could crew or pay for. Most of the MiG-29s left Mărculești during the 1990s: accounts put four or six in Yemen in 1994, one went to Romania, and in 1997 the United States bought 21. The US Defense Secretary, William Cohen, said on 4 November 1997 that rogue states including Iran were trying to buy such aircraft. English Wikipedia, citing a Department of Defense briefing, says the jets were flown to the National Air Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, in C-17 transports over two weeks.

What remained was renamed the Decebal Air Base on 23 December 1999. Six MiG-29s stayed, overhauled in Ukraine. In December 2010 the news agency Oreanda reported that an auction of all six at the "International Airport of Marculesti", at a starting price of 8.5 million dollars, had failed on 30 November for lack of bidders; the defence minister was quoted as saying they needed about 30 million dollars of repairs and would otherwise be broken up for parts and scrap.

The six were neither sold nor scrapped. English Wikipedia describes them as grounded for lack of spare parts, and the IISS inventory for 2024 that it cites lists no combat aircraft at all. In April 2022, weeks into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian outlet Militarnyi reported, after Yevropeiska Pravda, that Kyiv had asked to buy the jets "based in Markuleshti in the North of the country" and that Moldova had refused. Militarnyi also said they had been offered in 2010 in good working condition — a claim at odds with the ministry’s own 2010 estimate of repair costs.

No Moldovan official statement on the aircraft or on the base’s current role was found on the Ministry of Defence site in September 2026. Moldova is constitutionally neutral and its air force flies only a handful of Soviet-built transports and helicopters; where exactly they are kept is not published.