The Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, forbade Germany a military air force. The Treaty of Rapallo of 1922 normalised German relations with Soviet Russia, and both sides saw an opportunity: Germany could train and test in secret, and the Soviet Union would gain access to German technology. On 15 April 1925 Colonel Hermann von der Lieth-Thomsen, the Reichswehr’s permanent representative in Moscow, signed the contract for a flying school at Lipetsk.

It was run under cover names, among them the Wissenschaftliche Versuchs- und Personalausbildungsstation (scientific experimental and personnel training station), shortened to WIWUPAL. Training began in the spring of 1926. The aircraft came from the Netherlands: in 1923 the German army had ordered 100 new aircraft from Fokker, 50 of them the newly developed D.XIII fighter, and they formed the school’s fleet.

English Wikipedia puts the numbers at about 120 fighter pilots and more than 300 ground personnel trained, with an administrative and training staff of 450; some 140 Germans were at Lipetsk in summer and 40 in winter, alongside 340 Soviet employees. At its peak the school cost 4 million Reichsmarks a year. It closed by mutual agreement on 15 September 1933, and the site became the Soviet air base.

Lipetsk is home to the 4th Centre for Combat Employment and Retraining of Personnel, named after the test pilot Valery Chkalov. English Wikipedia dates it to the 1960s and describes it as the chief combat training centre of the Aerospace Forces. The distinction from Akhtubinsk, the flight test centre on the Volga, is important: Akhtubinsk proves that an aircraft and its weapons work; Lipetsk works out how squadrons should fight with them and trains the instructors who will teach everybody else.

The centre has always been a mixed bag of types. For the early 1990s English Wikipedia lists the 760th regiment with 14 MiG-29s, 13 Su-17s and 16 Su-25s as well as Su-24s, Su-27s and Mi-8 helicopters, and the 91st with MiG-23s, 23 MiG-29s and 15 Su-27s. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought another resident: the 968th regiment, withdrawn from Falkenberg in East Germany, which became a mixed aviation regiment in 1992–1993, flew only MiG-29s by 2004 and later took the Su-24M.

The city itself advertises the connection; its English Wikipedia article calls Lipetsk the home of the main training base of the Russian aerospace forces.

Almost every new Russian combat type of the past two decades has passed through Lipetsk. The first serial Yak-130 advanced trainer was handed to the training centre there in February 2010; a pre-series Yak-130 crashed at the base during testing on 29 May 2010. After the Su-35S completed its state tests, which began at Akhtubinsk in May 2011, several were transferred to Lipetsk to develop combat tactics and train personnel.

The Su-34 strike aircraft followed the same route, and the base’s 968th regiment received the last two aircraft of the 2012 production contract in December 2020. On 25 December 2020 the Russian Ministry of Defence announced that the first production Su-57 had entered service; English Wikipedia says some Su-57s are based at Lipetsk and Akhtubinsk for development and trials.

The work carries risk. On 6 September 2019 two Su-34s collided in the air near Lipetsk; according to a Russian source cited by English Wikipedia the collision was due to pilot error, and both aircraft landed. Earlier, Aviation Week had reported that air force pilots described weapons trials of the Su-27M at Akhtubinsk and Lipetsk in the 1990s as a “negative experience”, largely because of the single pilot’s workload.

Lipetsk lies within range of Ukrainian long-range drones, and since the summer of 2024 it has been one of the Russian air bases most often named in Ukrainian strike claims. English Wikipedia, citing DW, CNBC, the New York Times and Ukrainska Pravda, reports a drone attack on 8 August 2024 that caused numerous explosions and fires at a warehouse of guided aerial bombs, with six people reported injured; NASA’s FIRMS satellite fire data showed a fire on the base.

On 20 October 2024 Ukraine reported another drone attack aimed, in its words, at fuel, equipment and ammunition (RBC-Ukraine, as cited by Wikipedia). On 21 December 2025 Ukrainian sources claimed that long-range drones had destroyed a Su-30 and a Su-27 at the base (Ukrinform, as cited by Wikipedia). These are claims by one side; Russia does not publish losses, and none of the claimed aircraft losses at Lipetsk has been independently confirmed in the sources read for this dataset.