Russian Armed Forces

• 1. Introduction

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  The Russian Armed Forces maintain the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons. They are also the only military outside the United States and China that operates strategic bombers. Yet as of 2025, with approximately US$190 billion committed to defence - roughly 7.5 percent of Russia's entire GDP - those same forces have been grinding through a war that has exposed corruption, broken command structures, and a casualty rate that NATO officials described, in early 2026, as "unsustainable." How does one of the planet's most heavily funded and most heavily armed militaries end up issuing a manual to soldiers on how to dig and maintain mass graves? The answers reach back to the final hours of the Soviet Union in December 1991, wind through a decade of near-collapse in the 1990s, pass through a radical reform push in 2008, and arrive at a full-scale invasion that has reshaped the force more dramatically than anything since the Red Army's founding.

• 2. Birth from Soviet Collapse

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  On the 25th of December 1991, the Soviet Union officially ceased to exist, and the question of what would happen to its enormous military became urgent. Marshal Yevgeny Shaposhnikov attempted to hold the armed forces together as a unified instrument of the Commonwealth of Independent States, but the effort unravelled quickly. Units stationed in newly independent republics began swearing loyalty to their new governments. Assets were divided by treaty. President Boris Yeltsin moved decisively: in May 1992 he established the Russian Ministry of Defence, and on the 7th of May he signed the decree that formally created the Russian Armed Forces, assuming the title of Supreme Commander-in-Chief himself. Colonel General Pavel Grachev was named Minister of Defence and promoted to Russia's first general of the army. Shaposhnikov and his small staff were physically removed from the Soviet General Staff buildings in central Moscow and relocated to the former Warsaw Pact headquarters on the city's outskirts. By June 1993, with the Russian Defence Ministry refusing to fund the CIS military structure, Shaposhnikov resigned, and the pretence of a shared post-Soviet force ended. What remained was a Russian military inheriting Soviet-era equipment, Soviet-era doctrine, and Soviet-era problems, without Soviet-era resources to sustain any of them.

• 3. Decade of Decay

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  Between 1991 and 1997, Russia's defence spending fell by a factor of eight in real prices. By 1998, when a severe financial crisis struck, military expenditure hit its lowest point: barely one quarter of what the USSR had spent in 1991. The numbers behind that collapse are striking. Overall military strength dropped from 2,720,000 personnel in 1992 to 1,004,000 by 2000. The Ground Forces shrank from 1,400,000 to 348,000. Annual flight hours for pilots fell to just 25 - far below the hours logged by NATO counterparts. By 1998, no military exercise above division level had been conducted since 1992. Bases inside Russia were overwhelmed by the sudden arrival of units withdrawn from eastern and central Europe, with no housing to receive them. Crime rose. The hazing of conscripts - known by the Russian term dedovshchina - became more widespread. Draft dodging followed. The First Chechen War from 1994 to 1996 showed the results: the military could not suppress separatist forces in Chechnya and the North Caucasus. A debate between Chief of the General Staff Anatoly Kvashnin and Defence Minister Igor Sergeyev over whether to fund conventional or nuclear forces ended with nuclear forces winning. The Navy, Air Force, and Air Defence Forces were each cut roughly in half; the Ground Forces by two-thirds. Internationally, corruption compounded every structural problem. In January 2008, a senior researcher at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, Tor Bukkvoll, assessed that the transition from Yeltsin to Putin had produced "minimal effect on Russian military corruption."

• 4. The New Look Reform

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  In October 2008, Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov and Chief of the General Staff General Nikolai Makarov launched what became known as the "New Look" reform. Analysts described it as "the most radical changes in the Russian military since the creation of the Red Army in 1918" and as "driving the transformation from a conventional mobilization army to a permanently combat-ready force." The groundwork had been laid by Sergey Ivanov, Defence Minister from 2001 to 2007, who had called for fewer conscripts, fewer officers, and more professional volunteer soldiers. What Serdyukov and Makarov actually executed was sweeping. Nine military districts became four, and each district gained a combat command role it had never held before. Most Ground Forces divisions were dissolved in favour of separate manoeuvre brigades, intended to be fully manned and equipped from the start. Multiple logistical arms were merged into a single command. Battalion tactical groups, staffed entirely by enlisted soldiers, were established as high-readiness strike units. The reform was controversial inside the military establishment from the beginning. After 2012, when Sergey Shoigu replaced Serdyukov as Defence Minister and General Valery Gerasimov became Chief of the General Staff, some elements were quietly reversed. The famed Tamanskaya and Kantemirovskaya divisions were restored, though in reduced form. Still, the core structural and procurement changes held. Their value showed clearly during the rapid seizure of Crimea in early 2014, when Russian special forces, Airborne Forces, and Naval Infantry moved with a speed and coordination that the Soviet-era mobilisation army could never have achieved.

• 5. Testing Ground: Syria

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  In July 2015, Syria formally requested military assistance from Russia, citing advances by the Islamic State. By August, an agreement had been signed covering Russian use of Khmeimim Air Base and the Tartus naval base. Russian aircraft and warships began arriving in September, and airstrikes commenced on the 30th of September 2015. The intervention served multiple purposes. Russian forces assisted Syrian Arab Armed Forces offensives in the Hama, Homs, and Aleppo regions through the fall of 2015. After a pause, Russia helped Syria retake Aleppo city from opposition forces in the summer and fall of 2016, and assisted in operations against ISIS at Palmyra in March 2016 and again in May 2017. The aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov was used in combat for the first time. By 2017, over 48,000 personnel had rotated through Syria; by 2021-90 percent of Aerospace Forces pilots had served there. The experience was strategically valuable in ways that went beyond tactical results. New equipment was tested. Command and control systems were evaluated under real conditions. However, the intervention also generated documented allegations of war crimes. The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic described a series of Russian air strikes on a market in Maarat al-Numan as a "double tap" strike: an initial bombing followed by a second wave targeting the same site as rescue workers arrived. The Commission recorded 43 deaths in that incident, including four children, and at least 109 injured civilians. A draw-down was announced in November 2017, with Russian military flights reduced to "a minimum and performed only for combat training and reconnaissance" by August 2019.

• 6. The 2022 Invasion and Its Costs

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  On the 24th of February 2022, Vladimir Putin ordered the Armed Forces to begin the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The General Staff directed five strategic axes: Kyiv via the Eastern Group of Forces as the main strike; Brovary for the Central group; Poltava for the Western group; and two directions for the Southern Group, toward Mariupol in Donetsk Oblast and west of Crimea toward Kherson. The Kyiv offensive was abandoned by March 2022. The Southern Group was the only formation to achieve its initial objectives. On the 10th of April 2022, General Aleksandr Dvornikov assumed field command. The initial force proved too small. Russia mobilised 300,000 members of its reserve in September 2022, drawing from former conscripts, enlisted soldiers, and officers whose service stretched back to the 1990s. By October 2024, estimates placed total Russian killed and wounded at over 600,000. By June 2025, Ukrainian and Western casualty estimates surpassed one million. In January 2026, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said up to 25,000 Russian soldiers were being killed per month, calling the losses "unsustainable." In April 2025, Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi reported that Russian troop strength in Ukraine had grown to 623,000, increasing by 8,000 to 9,000 soldiers each month. Russia's advantage in artillery had narrowed from 10 to 1 down to 2 to 1, largely because of Ukrainian strikes on Russian ammunition depots. Roughly 2 percent of all Russian men aged 20 to 50 had been killed or seriously wounded by June 2024. In November 2024, The Telegraph reported that Russia had issued a manual to soldiers covering how to dig and maintain mass graves. An investigation by the exiled outlet Vyorstka, cited by the BBC in February 2026, documented that killing subordinates had acquired its own military slang term: "zeroing."

• 7. Foreign Recruits and Coercion

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  India confirmed at least 44 Indian citizens had served in Russian military units, with several killed in combat. That number represented only the visible edge of a broader pattern. According to the Ukrainian Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, nearly 200 foreigners from 37 countries were being held as prisoners of war in October 2025 after being captured while fighting for Russia. In January 2026, a survey of over 10,000 Russian soldiers captured by Ukraine found that 7 percent were foreign mercenaries from 40 different countries. In May 2024, India's Central Bureau of Investigation arrested four people linked to a trafficking network that sent men to fight for Russia. Some Indian and Nepalese men reported being promised non-combat roles, only to be sent to the front line; others said they had entered Russia as tourists or students before being coerced into signing military contracts. Kenya announced in November 2025 that more than 200 Kenyans were fighting for Russia in Ukraine. That same month, Kenyan President William Ruto thanked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for helping free Kenyans who had been deceived into joining the Russian military. In March 2026, Kenya and Russia reached an agreement that the Russian Defence Ministry would stop recruiting Kenyans and cease deploying them to Ukraine. Danish researcher Karen Philippa Larsen, who had spoken with foreign soldiers captured by Ukraine, described three distinct categories: those who knowingly chose to fight as mercenaries; those who understood they were signing a Russian Defence Ministry contract but expected logistics or security work; and those who believed they were taking civilian jobs as technicians or agricultural workers. In March 2026, the European Parliament adopted a resolution condemning what it called Russia's "trafficking and coercive recruitment" of foreigners, describing networks that confiscated documents and forced recruits into frontline duty, and stating that recruited Africans were "treated as expendable."

• 8. Adaptation and Reconstitution

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  By July 2024, U.S. Army General Christopher Cavoli, serving as NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, said that Russia was "very cleverly adapting technologically and procedurally to many of the challenges that they run into in Ukraine." Cavoli also assessed in April 2024 that the Russian military had replaced its troop and equipment losses and was larger than before the start of the conflict. On the 12th of November 2025, Russia formally created its newest branch: the Unmanned Systems Forces, built to centralise the development, deployment, and operational command of unmanned aerial, ground, and naval systems. In June 2025, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said Russia was "reconstituting themselves at a rapid pace" and producing multiple times more ammunition than the whole of NATO, despite a much smaller economy. Rutte assessed that Russia could pose a threat to NATO territory within three to five years and called on member states to raise defence spending to 5 percent of GDP. The reform plan Shoigu announced in December 2022 - emphasising mass mobilisation and new units mixing conscripts and contract soldiers - has been described by some U.S. military observers as effectively recreating the Soviet Armed Forces within the present-day Russian Federation. The Royal United Services Institute noted in June 2024 that Russia's defence industry remained highly dependent on foreign imports of critical components, even as production and sophistication of its main weapons continued to grow. Whether that combination of mass reconstitution, technological adaptation, and expanding drone capability proves sustainable against the force's documented losses remains the central question that the creation of the Unmanned Systems Forces, on the 12th of November 2025, was designed to help answer.