Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Ukrainian Ground Forces
Summary
The Ukrainian Ground Forces (Сухопутні війська Збройних сил України), also known as the Ukrainian Army, are the land forces of Ukraine and one of the five branches of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. They were formed from Ukrainian units of the Soviet Army after Ukrainian independence, and trace their ancestry to the 1917-22 army of the Ukrainian People's Republic.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine retained its Soviet-era army equipment. The Armed Forces were systematically downsized and underinvested in after 1991. As a result, the Ukrainian Army had very little of its Soviet equipment in working order by July 2014 and most systems were antiquated. Personnel numbers had shrunk and training, command, and support functions needed improvement. After the start of the war in Donbas in April 2014 in eastern Ukraine, Ukraine embarked on a program to enlarge and modernize its Armed Forces. Personnel in the Ukrainian armed forces overall climbed from 129,950 in March 2014 to 204,000 active personnel in May 2015, with 169,000 soldiers in the Ground Forces branch as of 2016. In 2016, 75% of the army consisted of contract servicemen. Since 2014, Ukraine's ground forces have also been equipped with increasingly modern tanks, APCs, and many other types of combat equipment.
Today's Ground Forces traces its ancestry to the Ukrainian People's Army and Ukrainian Galician Army of 1917-21. It fought in the Ukrainian War of Independence (the Ukrainian-Soviet War), the Southern Front of the Russian Civil War, the Polish–Ukrainian War, and the Polish-Soviet War.
Since 2015, with the adoption of the Defenders Day holiday, certain traditions of the Second World War Ukrainian Insurgent Army have been incorporated into the ethos and culture of the Ground Forces.
Upon their establishment in 1991, the then brand new Ukrainian Ground Forces included approximately 780,000 personnel, 7,000 armored vehicles, 6,500 tanks, and 2,500 tactical nuclear missiles. A problem that Ukraine faced was that while it had vast armed forces, it lacked a proper command structure.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.