English Wikipedia dates the airfield at Vasylkiv to 1938. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 it held the headquarters of the 36th Fighter Aviation Division with four regiments — the 2nd, 43rd, 254th and 255th — placed to cover Kyiv.

In the Cold War Vasylkiv belonged to the Soviet Air Defence Forces rather than to the tactical air force. Wikipedia records the 146th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment here from the 1950s; by the end it flew the MiG-25PD, the upgraded version of the fast, high-flying interceptor built to meet bombers and reconnaissance aircraft. Wikipedia gives its strength at the end as 41 aircraft, a figure drawn from Russian enthusiast sources that could not be checked independently.

Independent Ukraine had no use for a large MiG-25 force it could not afford to run. The 146th was disbanded on 1 June 1993, and, according to the same article, the MiG-29s of the 92nd Fighter Aviation Regiment moved in during 1993–94. It was the start of three decades in which Vasylkiv’s role would be the air defence of the capital.

The 92nd Fighter Aviation Regiment took the oath of loyalty to the Ukrainian people in January 1992, in the weeks when the new state claimed the Soviet units on its soil. It later became the 40th Tactical Aviation Brigade, flying the MiG-29 and the two-seat MiG-29UB, later joined by the modernised MiG-29MU1, with L-39M1 Albatros jets for training. Before the war the base came under Air Command Centre, one of the air force’s four regional commands; its head from 2015, Anatolii Kryvonozhko, became commander of the whole air force in 2025.

Key Aero, describing the brigade in the war, lists its single-seat aircraft as the MiG-29 9.13 Fulcrum-C, typically armed with two R-27R radar-guided and four R-73 infrared missiles — Soviet weapons that were outranged by the missiles carried by Russian fighters. That gap, rather than the skill of the pilots, framed the air war over Kyiv.

Russia’s full-scale invasion opened before dawn on 24 February 2022 with ballistic and cruise missile strikes on Ukrainian air bases, Vasylkiv among them. Key Aero reported that the first strikes "failed to cause any damage to the base"; the air force had dispersed its aircraft in the hours before.

Two days later Ukrainian officials said Russian paratroopers had landed near the town to seize the airfield and been driven off in heavy fighting with the brigade’s troops. The claims around that night remain disputed: English Wikipedia notes that reports of two Il-76 transports shot down with hundreds of paratroopers were never confirmed by independent sources, and quotes The Guardian as finding "no convincing public evidence" of the downed aircraft or of a paratroop drop.

What is documented is the missile war. Early on 27 February a Russian missile hit the oil depot at Kriachky in Vasylkiv district, setting off a large fire, Militarnyi reported. On 12 March the mayor, Natalia Balasynovych, said in a video that eight missiles had struck the airfield at about 07:00, that the runway was destroyed and that the ammunition depot was still detonating. Ukraine held Vasylkiv throughout.

In the first days of the war a story spread worldwide of a MiG-29 pilot over Kyiv who had shot down six Russian aircraft on 24 February. On 30 April 2022 Air Force Command called the "Ghost of Kyiv" "a superhero-legend, whose character was created by Ukrainians", and said the name embodied the collective effort of its pilots. The pilot often named in the press as the Ghost, Maj. Stepan Tarabalka, was killed on 13 March 2022; he was not, the Air Force said, the Ghost.

The legend became an honour. English Wikipedia records that a presidential decree in 2024 gave the 40th Tactical Aviation Brigade the honorary name "Ghost of Kyiv", and by 2025 Ukrainian media such as Militarnyi were reporting the brigade’s MiG-29 strikes under that name.

The real brigade paid a real price. On 25 August 2023 two of its L-39 trainers collided during a combat mission over Zhytomyr region, killing Maj. Viacheslav Minka, Maj. Serhii Prokazin, a deputy brigade commander, and Capt. Andrii Pilshchykov, call sign "Juice", who had become known abroad as a campaigner for F-16s for Ukraine. The State Bureau of Investigation opened an inquiry.