[citation needed] During World War II the occupying German forces expanded the airfield and paved the runways, ruins of which are still visible today.

At the time of the Yalta Conference in February 1945 president Franklin D. Roosevelt's and prime minister Winston Churchill's aircraft landed at Saky.

[3][full citation needed] The Soviet Navy's Black Sea Fleet used Saky as a major air base.

[11] The 299th Regiment, by now designated Ukraine's 299th Tactical Aviation Brigade, flying solely Sukhoi Su-25s, moved away to Kulbakino Air Base in Mykolaiv Oblast in 2005.

[7] During the 2008 South Ossetia War, Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko stopped Russian pilots from using the carrier training facilities.

[11] Meanwhile, the Russian Navy had begun to build a similar facility at Yeysk in the Krasnodar region of Russia, by the Sea of Azov.

[14] The incident took place outside the Novofedorivka Air Base in the military dormitory building, which was occupied by Ukrainian servicemen and their families that were awaiting relocation to mainland Ukraine.

[15][16] The fight escalated to where Junior Sergeant Yevheniy S. Zaytsev of the Black Sea Fleet shot the unarmed officer twice in the head and chest at point blank range with an AK-74 assault rifle on the fifth floor of the dormitory building where Russian soldiers were evacuating the troops.

Most of the damaged or destroyed aircraft [were] in a specific area of the base where a large number of planes were parked out in the open – away from the cover of hangars.

[26] The base has two, parallel, southwest–northeast runways, a smaller east–west carrier landing facility, and an extensive dispersal complex to the north and west.