The museum exists because of enthusiasm rather than any grand plan. As the strategic bombers were being eliminated, two were spared for the sake of a future exhibition, and a few more were brought in from other locations. In 2007, on the grounds of the former airbase, former military pilots assembled these survivors into a collection. By January 2014 the exposition had grown to nine aircraft, arranged in the open air alongside the weapons they were built to carry. It is a museum shaped by the people closest to the machines, men who understood exactly what these aircraft were and what it meant to see them grounded for good.

The lineup reads like a survey of Soviet long-range aviation. There is the Tu-160, the swing-wing strategic bomber that remains one of the largest combat aircraft ever built, and the turboprop Tu-95MS with its distinctive contra-rotating propellers. The Tu-22M3 and older Tu-16 represent the base's own history; supporting types include the Su-15 interceptor, the An-26 transport, and the L-29 Delfin trainer. Around them sit the ordnance: air-launched cruise missiles like the KSR-2, KSR-5, and Kh-22, and aerial bombs ranging from a hundred kilograms up to a staggering nine thousand. Walking among them, the scale is hard to absorb, aircraft the size of airliners designed to fly for hours toward the far side of a divided world. That the museum could assemble such a fleet at all is a quirk of history: Poltava had been a working strategic bomber base, so the raw material of a world-class aviation collection was already parked on its concrete when the decision came to disarm.

Poltava's runway carries a much older story too. During the Second World War it was one of the sites of Operation Frantic, a joint Soviet-American venture in which American B-17 Flying Fortresses flew shuttle-bombing missions against Nazi Germany and its allies, landing at Soviet fields to refuel and rearm. The bond was commemorated in 1994, when American aircraft returned for the fiftieth anniversary: a KC-10 Extender tanker, a B-52H Stratofortress, and a B-1B Lancer touched down where their predecessors had. A memorial on the grounds honors the airmen who fell during Operation Frantic, tying this field to an alliance that once spanned an ocean.

A museum is supposed to be where history comes to rest, yet Poltava's has stayed unexpectedly current. In 2025 it was reported that Ukraine's intelligence service had used some of the parked aircraft here to help train a targeting artificial intelligence, a reminder that even retired machines can be pressed back into the present. The story underscores something about this place: the aircraft on the tarmac are not just relics of a finished contest but objects that still carry meaning, still teach, still matter to a country living through its own difficult history. The bombers may never fly again, but they have not stopped being useful.