18th Guards Assault Aviation Regiment

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "18th Guards Assault Aviation Regiment" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (December 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Russian. (December 2020) Click [show] for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Russian Wikipedia article at [[:ru:18-й гвардейский истребительный авиационный полк]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|ru|18-й гвардейский истребительный авиационный полк}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

18th Guards Assault Aviation Regiment
18-й гвардейский штурмовой авиационный полк
Active	1942–Present
Country	Soviet Union (until 1991)  Russia
Branch	Soviet Air Forces (until 1991)  Russian Air Force
Type	Attack aircraft
Role	Ground Attack
Size	Regiment
Part of	303rd Composite Aviation Division
Garrison/HQ	Chernigovka (air base)
Engagements	World War II
Decorations	Order of the Red Banner (2)  Order of Suvorov 3rd class Legion of Honor (France)
Honorifics	Vitebsk
Aircraft flown
Attack	Su-25

The 18th Guards Assault Aviation Vitebsk twice Red Banner, the Order of Suvorov and the French Cross of the Order of the Legion of Honor Regiment "Normandie-Niemen" (18-й гвардейский штурмовой авиационный полк; 18th Guards ShAP) was a military unit of the Soviet Air Forces. It is now part of the Russian Aerospace Forces.

It was originally organised from the 6th Fighter Aviation Regiment between 28 February and 15 May 1942 as in the Siberian Military District.^[1] It was given the status of a Guards unit in accordance with a Prikaz of the NKO, No. 70 оf 07.03.1942. It fought in the Great Patriotic War, winning fame in France as it incorporated the Normandie-Niemen Free French flyers, and in the Korean War, later entering the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. From March 1952 it was based at Galenki, Primorskiy Krai [44 05 49N, 131 48 12E] in the Russian Far East.^[2]

Its most recent form dates from March 1993 when it was reorganised as a штурмовой (literally "ground attack") unit, Military Unit Number 21806, being previously equipped with the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-27 "Flogger." During the 1990s and 2000s it was part of the 11th Air and Air Defence Forces Army.

It was amalgamated with the 187th Assault Aviation Regiment into the 6983rd Guards Aviation Base in December 2009, but then reformed at Chernigovka, Primorsky Krai, still in the Far East, in 2013. In 2019 it was reported as including two squadrons of Sukhoi Su-25 "Frogfoot."^[3]