Russian Ground Forces

• 1. Introduction

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  The Russian Ground Forces trace their founding to a single decree signed by Boris Yeltsin on the 7th of May 1992, though the army that emerged from that document inherited decades of Soviet structure, culture, and dysfunction all at once. In one of the more striking images from those early years, formations returning from Eastern Europe were unloaded from rail wagons into empty fields because the facilities in Russia's military districts were simply too inadequate to receive them. Tens of thousands of personnel poured back from the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Mongolia, and the infrastructure they needed did not exist. What kind of force would take shape from that chaos? How would it fight, and how would it fail? Those questions would be answered over the next three decades, through two wars in Chechnya, a constitutional crisis in Moscow, and an invasion of Ukraine that became one of the most costly military undertakings in post-Cold War history.

• 2. Birth from Collapse

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  Marshal Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, the last Minister of Defence of the Soviet Union, was appointed supreme commander of the Commonwealth of Independent States Armed Forces in December 1991. The hope was that a single military structure could survive the Soviet dissolution intact. A temporary agreement on general purpose forces was signed in Minsk on the 14th of February 1992, but the arrangement unraveled quickly once Ukraine made clear it intended to form its own armed forces. The new Russian government followed suit, and Yeltsin's decree of the 7th of May 1992 established both the Russian Ministry of Defence and the Ground Forces alongside the other branches.

  The scale of the resulting withdrawal was enormous. Thirty-seven Soviet Ground Forces divisions had to be pulled back from the Warsaw Pact states and the Baltic states. Four military districts handed over a total of 57 divisions to Belarus and Ukraine. The Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe required the destruction and transfer of large quantities of weaponry, adding another layer of logistical strain. The mobile cadre formations that remained on Russian soil were largely under-resourced. The Ground Forces were effectively reassembled from parts moving in too many directions at once.

  A reform plan appeared in the Ministry of Defence newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda on the 21st of July 1992. One commentator later said it had been hastily put together by the General Staff to satisfy public demand for radical changes. The plan called for converting the Army-Division-Regiment structure into a Corps-Brigade arrangement, with the goal of producing more flexible forces capable of independent action at every level. In practice, the change proved rare, irregular, and sometimes reversed. New brigades that appeared were mostly just divisions that had shrunk to brigade strength. The General Staff, from that point on, became a bastion of conservatism.

• 3. Corruption Inside the Ranks

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  The military procurator in Moscow reported a 40-percent increase in crime in September 1990, including a 41-percent rise in serious bodily injuries, in just the preceding six months. The Russian Ground Forces inherited that trajectory and then accelerated it. Draft resistance had grown in the final years of the Soviet Union, and authorities tried to compensate by enlisting men with criminal records and who spoke little or no Russian.

  Generals directing the withdrawals from Eastern Europe diverted arms, equipment, and foreign money intended to build housing for returning troops. Former commander in Germany General Matvey Burlakov and Defence Minister Pavel Grachev were both later implicated. They were also accused of ordering the murder of reporter Dmitry Kholodov, who had been investigating those scandals. In December 1996, Defence Minister Igor Rodionov ordered the dismissal of the Commander of the Ground Forces, General Vladimir Semyonov, over activities described as incompatible with his position.

  A 1995 study by the U.S. Foreign Military Studies Office concluded that the Armed Forces were an institution increasingly defined by high levels of criminality and corruption embedded within it at every level. The study identified four major categories: weapons trafficking, business and commercial ventures, military crime beyond Russia's borders, and contract murder. Within units, rations were reportedly sold while soldiers went hungry, and fuel, spare parts, and equipment could be purchased on the side. General Major Alexander Perelyakin was dismissed from his post with the United Nations peacekeeping force in Bosnia-Hercegovina following sustained complaints of smuggling, profiteering, and corruption.

  Visiting the 20th Army in April 2002, Defence Minister Sergey Ivanov called the volume of theft simply impermissible. He reported that 20,000 servicemen across the entire armed forces were wounded or injured that year as a result of accidents or criminal activity. Sergei Ivanov's Order 428 of October 2005 banned the practice of sending soldiers to work outside their units. In July 2013, the Prosecutor General's office revealed that corruption that year had grown 5.5 times compared to the previous year, costing the Russian government 4.4 billion rubles. In March 2011 alone, Military Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky reported 500 crimes in the Ground Forces in the period of January through March, with crime levels up 16 percent in 2010 compared to 2009.

• 4. The Chechen Wars

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  Defence Minister Pavel Grachev assured President Yeltsin that he could take Grozny with a single airborne assault regiment in two hours. That promise did not age well. The operation began on the 11th of December 1994, and by the 31st of December Russian forces were entering the Chechen capital. The 131st Motor Rifle Brigade was ordered to make a swift push for the city center and was virtually destroyed in Chechen ambushes.

  Dzhokar Dudayev, the former Air Forces officer who had declared Chechen independence in November 1991, was assassinated in a Russian airstrike on the 21st of April 1996. That summer, a Chechen attack retook Grozny. Alexander Lebed, then Secretary of the Security Council, began talks with Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov in August 1996 and signed an agreement on 22-the 23rd of August. The formal ceasefire was signed in the Dagestani town of Khasavyurt on the 31st of August 1996. The agreement stipulated that a formal resolution on relations between the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and the Russian federal government did not need to be signed until late 2001.

  Then Lieutenant Colonel Mark Hertling of the U.S. Army visited the Ground Forces in 1994. He described Russian barracks with twenty beds lined up in a large room similar to what the U.S. Army had during World War II, food in mess halls that was terrible, and training exercises that were rote demonstrations with little opportunity for maneuver or imagination. He crawled into a T-80 tank and found it cramped, dirty, and in poor repair. Dmitri Trenin and Aleksei Malashenko later described the Russian military's performance in Chechnya as grossly deficient at all levels, from commander-in-chief to the drafted private.

  Between 1996 and 1999, the Ground Forces made genuine improvements. When the Second Chechen War began in August 1999 after Chechen militias invaded Dagestan, formations were brought up to strength with replacements, put through preparatory training, and then dispatched, instead of the hastily assembled composite regiments of the first war. Large-scale opposition was crippled more quickly. The Second Chechen War was officially declared ended on the 16th of April 2009, though small-scale conflict had spread across other parts of the Russian Caucasus years before that date. General Colonel Gennady Troshev was dismissed in 2002 for refusing to transfer from command of the North Caucasus Military District to the less important Siberian Military District.

• 5. Decades of Reform

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  Igor Sergeyev arrived as Minister of Defence in 1997 and directed the disbanding of the Ground Forces headquarters itself in December of that year. Military analyst Michael Orr called the decision a military nonsense, justifiable only in terms of internal politics within the Ministry of Defence. Sergeyev announced in August 1998 that six divisions and four brigades would be on 24-hour alert by year's end. Personnel quality in even those favored units remained a problem, with fuel shortages hampering training and a lack of well-trained junior officers undercutting combat effectiveness.

  President Putin reestablished the Ground Forces Headquarters and committed more funds. The defence budget rose from 141 billion rubles in 2000 to 219 billion rubles in 2001. A 20-percent pay rise was authorized in 2001. Plans called for reducing mandatory conscript service to 18 months in 2007, and to one year by 2008. As of 2009, the length of conscript service had reached 12 months.

  Anatoliy Serdyukov launched a major reorganisation beginning in 2007, converting all divisions into brigades and cutting surplus officers. By September 2009, his commander-in-chief Vladimir Boldyrev reported that 85 brigades of constant combat preparedness had been created. General Mark Hertling visited Russia during his term as Commander of United States Army Europe in 2011-2012 at the invitation of Ground Forces Commander Colonel-General Aleksandr Streitsov. The U.S. Defence Attache told Hertling that the Ground Forces, while still substantive in quantity, continued to decline in capability and quality. Hertling's own visits reinforced those conclusions: classroom discussions were sophomoric and units in training were going through the motions with no true training value.

  When Sergey Shoygu replaced Serdyukov as Defence Minister, he reversed many of the reorganisation steps and worked to restore trust with senior officers. Shoygu ordered 750 military exercises, including Vostok 2018. He shifted focus toward battalion tactical groups as the permanent readiness component, citing a lack of manpower needed for permanent-readiness brigades. By August 2021, Shoygu claimed the Russian army had around 170 BTGs.

• 6. Ukraine and the Cost of War

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  Russia deployed some 150,000 soldiers around Ukraine by mid-February 2022, drawing elements from the 29th, 35th, and 36th Combined Arms Armies to Belarus, and the 20th and 8th Combined Arms Armies near the Ukrainian border, among others. On the 24th of February 2022, Russian troops began invading Ukraine.

  Phillips O'Brien, a professor of strategic studies at St Andrews University, described the Russian army as a boxer with a great right hook and a glass jaw. Retired U.S. four-star general Curtis Scaparrotti blamed confusion and poor morale among Russian soldiers over their mission for their poor performance. Tank losses were reported as a consequence of sophisticated Ukrainian anti-tank weapons and a lack of air support.

  The 2022 Moscow Victory Day Parade was reduced by some 35 percent in ground combat vehicles. The official guide listed only 25 combat systems and 131 ground combat vehicles, compared to 198 vehicles and 35 combat systems in 2021. Russia used older equipment to fill gaps, including tank transporters in place of actual tanks. In 2023, only a single World War II-vintage tank appeared at the parade. On the 14th of February 2023, British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace told the BBC that 97 percent of the Russian Ground Forces were committed to the war in Ukraine.

  After 14 months of fighting, Russian forces were estimated to have lost over 2,000 tanks. United States officials estimated Russian forces had suffered 150,000 killed and wounded from the 24th of February 2022 through the 21st of January 2023. Ukraine claimed that at least 12 generals had been killed as of the 6th of May 2023 and that some 317 officers had died, a third of them senior command staff. The UK Ministry of Defence described the Russian officer corps as suffering devastating losses, particularly in the junior to mid-officer ranks. In stark contrast, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said only 5,937 personnel from the entire Armed Forces had been killed in the first seven months of the invasion.

  In February 2023, the IISS estimated Ground Forces numbers had climbed to around 550,000, including approximately 100,000 conscripts and up to 300,000 mobilized personnel. That figure compares to a CIA estimate of 300,000 active duty before February 2022. By 2025, Russia had resorted to using donkeys, horses, and civilian cars on the front lines following high equipment losses. The New York Times reported in September 2023, citing U.S. and European officials, that Russia was manufacturing more ammunition than the United States and Europe combined, producing 200 tanks and two million units of ammunition in a year.

• 7. People and Structure

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  Russia had 72 officer training academies that graduated around 18,000 officers annually before Serdyukov's reforms reduced those numbers in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Academies run five-year terms producing leaders from platoon to battalion level. Because of the traditional absence of a developed non-commissioned officer corps, many roles ordinarily filled by NCOs in NATO armies have historically been performed by junior officers in Russian and Soviet forces.

  In 2006, the Ground Forces included an estimated 360,000 persons, approximately 190,000 of them conscripts. By 2025, the IISS estimated 550,000 soldiers, including about 100,000 conscripts. A conscript is defined as a male Russian citizen between the ages of 18 and 30. Contract soldiers, who may be citizens or non-citizens, sign voluntarily with the Ministry of Defense. Since the start of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has reportedly been recruiting between 400,000 and 500,000 contract soldiers per year according to its Ministry of Defense.

  Women are not conscripted. According to the BBC, there were 90,000 women in the Russian Army in 2002. By 2013 that figure had dropped to 29,000 across the entire Armed Forces, with none above the rank of colonel and 3.5 percent serving in command posts. A 2016 TASS article attributed a decline from over 90,000 in the late 2000s to about 45,000 in 2011 to increased requirements for female applicants and an overall reduction in service personnel. Defence Minister Shoygu said approximately 1,100 women were deployed in the Russian invasion of Ukraine as of March 2023.

  Ground Forces Day is celebrated on the 1st of October, a date chosen to commemorate the edict by Tsar Ivan the Terrible on that date in 1550 ordering the placement of a thousand servicemen in Moscow and surrounding districts, forming a local brigade of Streltsy. Putin signed the decree establishing the holiday on the 31st of May 2006. The first celebration was held at the Preobrazhenskaya Square in Moscow. Colonel General Andrey Mordvichev was appointed the new commander in chief of the Ground Forces in May 2025.