Severomorsk-3 opened in 1950, in the first wave of airfields the Soviet navy built on the Kola Peninsula to face the Atlantic. Its first long tenant set its character: the 987th Maritime Missile Aviation Regiment, which flew Tu-16s from here from 1952 until 1993, according to English Wikipedia. The Tu-16 was the backbone of Soviet naval missile aviation — 107 of the Tu-16KS missile-carrying version alone were built for the navy between 1954 and 1958 — and the doctrine behind it was simple: find the American carrier groups in the Norwegian Sea and hit them with missiles from beyond the reach of their fighters.

The base was watched closely. Wikipedia’s article draws on declassified CIA documents from 1959, 1964, 1970–1971 and 1980, and one of those reports records Egyptian Air Force Tu-16 crews training at Severomorsk-3 in 1970–1971, when the Soviet Union was arming Egypt after the 1967 war. The 987th regiment outlived the Soviet Union by only two years; Russia retired the Tu-16 from military service by 1995.

In October 1976 the 279th Independent Shipborne Shturmovik Aviation Regiment joined the base. It had first formed at Saky in Crimea to take the Yak-38, the vertical-take-off fighter that entered service on 11 August 1976 and went to sea in the Kiev-class carriers — about a dozen per ship, alongside 16 helicopters. The Yak-38 was a limited aircraft, and it was retired in 1991, but the regiment kept 27 of them on strength in 1992, according to Wikipedia’s Severomorsk-3 article.

Its successor was the Su-27K, the navalised Flanker. Viktor Pugachyov made the first landing of a Su-27K on the carrier now called Admiral Kuznetsov on 1 November 1989, two years after the first flight from the NITKA ramp at Saky. The Soviet collapse cut the programme to 24 production aircraft; the type was renamed Su-33 when it formally entered service on 31 August 1998. Thirteen Su-27Ks sailed with Admiral Kuznetsov to the Mediterranean from December 1995 to March 1996. In 2016 the surviving aircraft received the SVP-24 targeting system, and the regiment also flies Su-25UTG two-seat deck-landing trainers.

The ships the regiment was formed for did not survive the 1990s in Russian service. Kiev, commissioned on 28 December 1975, was sold to a Chinese company in 1996 and has been a theme park in Tianjin since 2004; Minsk ended up as a museum in Jiangsu; Novorossiysk was broken up at Pohang in South Korea in 1997; and the fourth ship, Baku (later Admiral Gorshkov), was sold to India in 2004 and serves today as INS Vikramaditya. Of the Soviet carriers, only Admiral Kuznetsov stayed in Russia — and with it the whole future of the regiment.

In February 2012 Russia announced an order for 20 MiG-29KR and four MiG-29KUBR fighters for Admiral Kuznetsov, all delivered by early 2016, and a second carrier regiment, the 100th, was formed by January 2016 to fly them. That autumn both regiments went to war. Admiral Kuznetsov sailed on 15 October 2016 for the eastern Mediterranean; Russian figures quoted by Wikipedia credit its aircraft with 420 combat missions and 1,252 targets in Syria.

The cruise is remembered at least as much for its accidents. One MiG-29K went into the sea in mid-November after running out of fuel while the crew repaired a broken arresting cable (the date and variant differ between sources: 13 November and a KUBR, or 14 November and a KR); on 3 December a Su-33 went over the side when the arresting gear failed. Both pilots survived. Most of the air wing finished the deployment ashore at Khmeimim.

The carrier was back by 9 February 2017 and has not deployed since. A floating dock sank beneath it in October 2018, a fire in December 2019 killed two people, in September 2024 open-source analysts reported its crew sent to fight in Ukraine, and in July 2025 work on it was reported suspended. The regiments at Severomorsk-3 remain; Wikipedia reports that a MiG-29KR of the 100th regiment was hit by a drone at Kacha in Crimea in December 2025, a long way from home.