The Soviet navy trained its aircrew at several places that the 1990s scattered. One was Kacha near Sevastopol, home of the 859th Training Centre for Naval Aviation from 1981 to 2009; after 1991 it lay in independent Ukraine, though Russia’s Black Sea Fleet kept using it. The other was Ostrov, near Pskov, where a directive of 1 September 1994 created the 444th Centre for Combat Use and Retraining of naval aviation flight personnel. Ostrov’s centre handled the big aircraft — Tu-22M3 bombers, Tu-142 and Il-38 anti-submarine aircraft — alongside the 240th Guards regiment.

In 2009–2010 both were consolidated. On 1 December 2009 the Ostrov centre was disbanded, and on 1 February 2010 the 859th centre opened at Yeysk under Major General Alexei Serdyuk, with the training units from Ostrov and Kacha. Yeysk offered a long runway, a sheltered position on the Sea of Azov inside Russia, and an airfield with a long history of flying training. In September 2024 Wikipedia records a 190th Mixed Aviation Regiment as active here alongside the centre.

Yeysk was not new to military flying. During the Cold War the airfield served the Yeysk military aviation institute, and in the 1990s it belonged to the 10th Mixed Aviation Division of the 4th Air Army, according to English Wikipedia’s article on the town, which also mentions an aviation group of the Yeysk Higher Military Institute flying L-39 jet trainers. What changed in 2010 was ownership: the base became the navy’s own training centre. Kacha, the centre’s old home, had been on Ukrainian territory, used by Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, since 1991; Yeysk put naval aviation’s school inside Russia. When Russian forces took control of Crimea in 2014, Kacha and Saky came under Russian control again — a status Ukraine and UN General Assembly resolution 68/262 do not recognise — but the centre stayed at Yeysk.

At 18:25 Moscow time on 17 October 2022 a Su-34 bomber of the Aerospace Forces’ 277th Bomber Aviation Regiment crashed into an apartment block on Kommunisticheskaya Street in Yeysk. Both crew ejected. On the ground 15 people were killed and 26 injured, according to English Wikipedia; early reports gave at least 13 dead.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence said one of the engines had caught fire on take-off. Wikipedia’s article on the town says the aircraft came from the Yeysk airfield; the article on the crash describes it only as a Southern Military District airfield. The aircraft was not a naval aviation aircraft, but the disaster made Yeysk’s name known far beyond Russia and showed how close the base sits to the town. It came eight months into the full-scale war, at a time when Yeysk was still a rear base; within two years it would be within reach of Ukrainian drones.

From 2024 Ukraine extended its long-range drone campaign to Yeysk. Wikipedia records that drones reportedly destroyed two Su-25s on 4–5 April 2024; that an attack on 21 June 2024 hit the army’s 726th air defence training centre, with fires detected by NASA’s FIRMS satellite system; and that on 29 September 2024 waves of drones struck the base, causing fires and explosions.

The naval aircraft themselves were hit later. In December 2025, according to Wikipedia’s Il-38 article, an Il-38N — one of only eight upgraded to that standard — was seriously damaged by a Ukrainian drone at Yeysk. On 15 May 2026 a Ka-27 anti-submarine helicopter was destroyed in a drone attack on the airfield, per the Ka-27 article. Russia did not confirm these losses in the sources checked, and the figures should be read as Ukrainian claims and media reports summarised by Wikipedia.