Machulishchy was built as a Soviet military airfield just south of Minsk. English Wikipedia, relying on declassified CIA reports from 1962 to 1981, says it was home to the 121st Guards Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment with the Tu-22 and that by the mid-1960s it was one of nine major Tu-22 operating locations. In the 1970s Su-9 interceptors of the air defence forces were based here; they were replaced by MiG-23s in 1979. None of these unit details has been checked against Soviet or Belarusian records, and the airfield’s opening date is not given here.

The runway is 2,955 metres of concrete, according to the Wikipedia infobox, which adds that NASA imagery suggests it has been extended to about 3,000 metres.

The Belarusian Ministry of Defence says the history of the 50th Composite Air Base began in 1980, when, by a directive of the USSR defence minister, the 50th Separate Composite Aviation Regiment was formed in Chirchik in Soviet Uzbekistan to provide “fraternal assistance” to Afghanistan. The ministry marks 30 April as the unit’s anniversary, and the base celebrated 45 years in 2025. The sources read for this page do not say when the regiment moved to Belarus.

After independence it became Belarus’s composite air base, mixing fixed-wing transports and helicopters. Wikipedia lists Il-76MD and An-26 transports and Mi-8 and Mi-24 helicopters. When the helicopter squadron at Babruysk was disbanded in 2002, its personnel moved to the 50th, and the base has also sent helicopter crews to competitions such as Aviadarts; in July 2018 the ministry reported crews of “a composite air base” training for it at Osovtsy.

The base is part of Minsk’s life in a way the fighter fields are not: in 2015 the ministry reported the opening of a kindergarten for aviators’ families in the Machulishchy settlement, and it holds regular open days.

The ministry’s reports show the Il-76MDs flying well beyond Belarus. On 5 February 2020 an Il-76 left with humanitarian aid for Beijing, a flight of about 20 hours; in April 2020 an Il-76MD brought back more than 32 tonnes of medical supplies, including ventilators, and in May 2020 more than 10 tonnes more. In November 2021 an Il-76MD landed with 1.5 million doses of a Chinese-made COVID-19 vaccine, and another vaccine flight followed in December.

In October 2021 Il-76MDs flew generators, tents, food and medical supplies to Gissar in Tajikistan and brought Belarusian troops home from the Combat Brotherhood-2021 exercise. On 14 January 2022 the Belarusian peacekeepers of the CSTO operation in Kazakhstan returned to Machulishchy.

Russian aircraft and equipment used Machulishchy during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, according to Wikipedia. On 26 February 2023 the Belarusian opposition group BYPOL, made up of former security officers, said on Telegram that it had struck a Russian A-50 radar aircraft with drones and damaged it “in two critical places”, the radome and the nose. Belarusian and Russian officials at first denied an attack.

Commercial satellite imagery taken by Planet Labs on 28 February showed the A-50 largely intact on the flight line, and The War Zone concluded that any damage was too small to see. On 7 March 2023 President Lukashenko acknowledged an attack, telling reporters that the aircraft had suffered only superficial damage from a small drone, that the main suspect was a dual Ukrainian and Russian citizen recruited by Ukrainian special services, and that more than 20 accomplices had been detained, as Al Jazeera reported.

Radio Free Europe reported that the aircraft was later sent to Russia for repair, and in October 2024 a Belarusian court convicted 12 people, seven of them in absentia, with sentences of up to 25 years, according to the Associated Press as cited by Wikipedia. Exactly what was damaged has not been independently established.