When the Soviet Union broke up, Taldy-Kurgan, as the Russians spelled it, was a front-line field of the 73rd Air Army, the air arm of the Central Asian Military District. Wikipedia lists two regiments here when Kazakhstan took over the Soviet units in 1992: the 129th Fighter-Bomber Aviation Regiment, flying the MiG-27 ground-attack variant of the Flogger, and the 905th Fighter Aviation Regiment with MiG-23MLD interceptors.

The fighter-bomber line survived longest. Wikipedia’s airport article, citing FlightGlobal’s World Air Forces directory for 2015, describes the 604th Air Base as operating mainly MiG-27s and Su-27s and as the former 129th regiment. The MiG-27 was an unusual aircraft to keep: few air forces still flew it in the 2010s. Kazakhstan still had 12 MiG-27Ms in December 2022, according to Wikipedia’s MiG-27 article, and retired them in 2023.

Their end was controversial. The retired jets were offered at auction from October 2023, and in April 2024 the Kyiv Post reported that the United States had bought 81 former Kazakh aircraft to pass to Ukraine. The state arms trader Kazspetsexport denied it, saying foreign companies had not been allowed to bid. Which of the auctioned aircraft came from Taldykorgan was not established in the sources checked.

The best-documented day in the base’s recent history came on 1 May 2015, when the Irkut corporation handed over four Su-30SM two-seat multirole fighters at Taldykorgan. The Astana Times reported that Kazakh pilots and technicians had completed theoretical retraining at the Irkutsk aviation plant in March. The aircraft were bought under a first contract that Wikipedia puts at 5 billion roubles.

The then commander, Major General Nurlan Ormanbetov, told reporters that the fleet had received “up-to-date high manoeuvrable Su-30SM fighters”. The four were due to fly six days later in the parade for the 70th anniversary of victory in the Second World War. More followed: the first two of a second order in December 2016, and eight of a third order signed in May 2018, according to Wikipedia; by 2024 Wikipedia counted 29 in service.

The Su-30SM did not stay at Taldykorgan alone. By 2021 the Astana Times was reporting Su-30SM crews at Karaganda, where Ardana Botai served, while she had trained at Taldykorgan for several months first. How the fleet is divided between the two bases today has not been published. Wikipedia counts 29 Su-30SMs in Kazakh service in 2024 against 24 known to have been ordered in the three contracts, a gap its articles do not explain, and the Ministry of Defence gives no figures by base.

The current Kazakh AIP describes Taldykorgan (UAAT) in purely civil terms. Its reference point sits at the centre of a single runway, 02/20, 3,000 metres long and 50 metres wide, of reinforced concrete, at an elevation of 1,944 feet. The operator is JSC Zhetysu Aircompany, and the aerodrome page does not mention the Ministry of Defence at all, which is common for Kazakh joint-use fields where the military side is not open to civil traffic.

Wikipedia’s airport article classes the field as public and military, 12 km north-east of the city, with scheduled domestic services by Qazaq Air and SCAT to Astana and Turkistan and a seasonal Zhetysu service to Usharal. For a regional city of Taldykorgan’s size, a 3-kilometre concrete runway is a legacy of its Soviet fighter regiments rather than of its airline traffic.

Taldykorgan appears in the careers of the service’s leaders. Dauren Kossanov began flying in 1990 with the fighter regiment at Usharal, further east, then commanded a Su-27 squadron at Taldykorgan before serving as chief of staff at Karaganda and commanding the base at Shymkent. He led the Air Defence Forces from July 2013 to September 2019 and again from December 2022, and became defence minister on 8 June 2025. Between his two spells in command he headed the Talgat Bigeldinov Military Institute in Aktobe, the service’s own flying school.

Ardana Botai’s route ran the other way, from civil aviation into the fighter force. A graduate of the Civil Aviation Academy in Almaty with 240 flying hours on light aircraft, she trained at Taldykorgan before making her first flight as a Su-30SM crew commander in August 2021, the first woman in the Kazakh armed forces to do so, according to the service’s commander at the time.

The city itself has changed status around the base. Taldykorgan was the capital of Almaty Region from 1997; on 8 June 2022 it became the capital of the new Jetisu Region. The airfield’s civil side, run by Zhetysu Aircompany, carries domestic flights to Astana and Turkistan, and the unrest of January 2022 reached the city, though no event at the air base was reported in the sources checked.