English Wikipedia dates the airfield to 1950, when the 61st Fighter Aviation Regiment was established on it; the Belarusian ministry, celebrating the 61st Fighter Air Base’s 75th anniversary on 1 May 2026, implicitly counts from 1951. The same article, drawing on ww2.dk and declassified CIA reports, says the 45th Heavy Bomber Aviation Division and its 203rd regiment arrived on 7 November 1951, turning Baranovichi into a Long-Range Aviation base as well as a fighter field.

Its bombers ranged far. From the mid-1950s Baranovichi Tu-16s flew to the high Arctic, and in 1958 Tu-16s deployed to the Soviet drifting ice station SP-6. By the mid-1960s the CIA counted Baranovichi among the nine main operating locations of the supersonic Tu-22, and in the 1980s its Tu-22s were assigned to anti-ship work over the Baltic while the 61st flew MiG-25 interceptors. These details come from Wikipedia’s summary of Western intelligence and specialist sources and have not been checked against Soviet or Belarusian archives.

When the Soviet Union dissolved, the regiment passed to Belarus and became the 61st Fighter Air Base, flying MiG-29s and Su-27s. The episode that defines it came on 23 May 1996. Lt Col. Vladimir Karvat, born in Brest in 1958 and the base’s chief of air-fire and tactical training, was flying a training sortie in a Su-27P when the aircraft failed over the villages of Arabovshchina and Bolshoe Gatishche in the Baranovichi district. The ministry says he steered it away from the houses; the Su-27P fell about a kilometre from Arabovshchina and he was killed.

Karvat became the first Hero of Belarus, and the ministry still marks the anniversary each year with school visits, a chess tournament and memorial services. Twenty-five years later the pattern repeated: on 19 May 2021 a Yak-130 from the Lida air base crashed in Baranovichi, and its crew, Major Andrei Nichiporchik and Lieutenant Nikita Kukonenko, were made Heroes of Belarus posthumously for turning the aircraft away from homes.

In peacetime the base practised dispersal. The ministry reported MiG-29s and Su-27s of the 61st landing on highway strips in 2013 and 2014, part of a road-airfield programme that had begun in 2007.

The Su-27 was retired in December 2012, according to Wikipedia, leaving the MiG-29 as the only fighter for seven years. The replacement came from Russia: on 13 November 2019 the ministry announced the first pair of the 12 Su-30SMs ordered, arriving at Baranovichi, and noted that Belarus already had experience of Sukhoi fighters from its Su-27 years. The newer Su-30SM2 has been delivered since May 2025 in batches that the ministry says arrived at “one of the airfields”, without naming which.

Russian aircraft have used the base for years. The ministry reported a second shift of Russian servicemen beginning joint air defence duty at Baranovichi on 5 March 2014, a Russian A-50 radar aircraft moved here that month during a readiness check, and in June 2014 four Russian Su-27s stationed at Baranovichi and six at Babruysk. In August 2021, as Minsk and Moscow set up a joint air force and air defence training centre, the ministry said Russian Su-30SMs were due at Baranovichi on 3 September.

In February 2022 elements of the Union Resolve-2022 exercise redeployed around Baranovichi. AirForces Monthly reported, and Wikipedia repeats, that Su-35Ss of Russia’s 23rd Fighter Aviation Regiment operated from the base from February to April 2022 during the Russian invasion of Ukraine and left with the retreat from Kyiv. Belarus says it is not a party to the war; the UN General Assembly deplored its involvement in resolution ES-11/1 on 2 March 2022.

On 23 May 2021 Ryanair Flight 4978, from Athens to Vilnius, was diverted to Minsk over a bomb threat, and the opposition journalist Raman Pratasevich was arrested on the ground. The same day the ministry reported that a MiG-29 alert crew had been scrambled from Baranovichi to accompany a civil aircraft needing help to land safely.

ICAO’s fact-finding report of 17 January 2022 found the bomb threat “deliberately false” and said the MiG-29 had been tasked with communications back-up and to protect Minsk, and did not approach nor escort the airliner. The European Union nonetheless sanctioned the air force commander for dispatching military aircraft to escort the forced landing. Belarus maintains that it acted lawfully.