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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Composition of the Ground Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. July 2026 |
| 2026-08-04 |
| [ColonelCassad] As you can tell on closer examination, Ukrainian armed forces have between four and five maneuver brigades plus a number of other units attached as well We have discussed this here at rantburg.com before, as the Soviets proposed brigading their maneuver forces into corps with five maneuver brigades per corps. It appeared that sometime between the 1960s and 1979, the Soviets/Russians did brigade their maneuver units, albeit without the corresponding corps structure, keeping those units under the command of an army — in the case of Afghanistan, the Soviet 40th Army. Under the former Soviet unit structures, the army was always destined to be a corps unit. The Soviets/Russians through the Great Fatherland War regarded the corps, if it were composed of mechanized units, as just that, and rarely treating some leg rifle divisions. When they did create corps rifle units, it was a task organized unit detailed to the corps commander and his staff. The organization then, as I saw it, went down to battalion level, where each brigade had five battalions, two tank and three mechanized infantry battalions in the case of infantry units or three tank battalions, two mechanized battalions all with a large host of supporting units: recon, air defense, engineer and so on. At the moment in the new territorial units, the Russians have a similar structure in that their "groups" of forces control, supply, and maneuver brigades as part of corps/army units. Those groups of forces include traditional maneuver units -- divisions, where a Russian Army will have two or three maneuver brigades and one divisional unit. A graphic in English is at the link. |
| Posted by:badanov |