In a sweeping reform intended to make over the Armed Forces of Ukraine’s (AFU) often-haphazard regional command structure into a modern warfighting machine, commanding general Oleksandry Syrsky on Monday announced that the Ukrainian army will convert its frontline formations into corps-sized command groups built around some of the AFU’s most effective combat brigades.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in an evening television address, said the deep changes to AFU headquarters structure and fighting unit chains of command would improve combat efficiency and make possible rotations of units – sometimes deployed to the fighting line for more than a year – to rear areas for rest and recuperation.
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A common and longstanding complaint by Ukrainian frontline commanders and troops is a three-year-old AFU policy of juggling hundreds of small units in and out of deployments along a 1,000-kilometer-long (621-mile-long) front, without a centralized local command.
Army headquarters in Kyiv often micromanages even tiny battles, making coordination and even exchange of basic information about enemy locations and friendly fortifications between actual units doing the fighting difficult, those complaints say.
Ukrainian military media on Tuesday confirmed initial orders for the restructuring had gone out and a reported six corps headquarters would take over direct control of sectors of the front, and that each would be assigned five combat brigades, on paper giving each corps formation a front-line strength of 12-15,000 men and around 700-900 heavy weapons like tanks, armored personnel carriers or artillery.
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Yuriy Butusov, the editor-in-chief of the Censor.net information platform, in Tuesday evening comments, said the AFU plans to scale picked brigades – a formation typically with 1,500-2,000 men and around 100-150 heavy weapons – and build new forces around them.
Each corps will be assigned a specific area of responsibility and will contain artillery, air defense, intelligence, EW and support units, with total personnel reaching up to 50,000, he said.
By statute, the AFU contains the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th Army Corps, the 7th Rapid Response Corps (Air Assault) and 30th Naval Infantry (Marine) Corps. Prior to the reforms announced by Syrsky, those headquarters’ main role was administration and support.
Each of the new Corps will become combat-capable, with all-arms formations built around existing brigades – whose soldiers and officers have over three years of war experience – become standout tactical formations, Syrsky said.
The announcement seemed to reverse longstanding AFU policy to, where possible, promote long-serving, fast-track professional officers ahead of men who commanded obscure units or even were civilians prior to Russia’s second invasion, but who came to prominence as skilled combat leaders.
Ukrainian media named four of the picked units slated to become the backbone of new corps commands. Three were formations that were not regular Ukrainian army units at the outset of the war but, thanks to battle performance, skilled leadership, and in some cases, a strong recruiting pool, over time, grew into standout fighting outfits, Kyiv Post researchers found.
The 12th National Guard Brigade – far better known in Ukraine and abroad as “Azov” – started out the war as a local defense unit responsible for rear area security. Led by a charismatic English-language degree-holder named Denys Prokopenko, Azov fought a vicious, die-hard defense during the three-month siege of the Azov port city Mariupol in 2022. The unit initially recruited in Ukraine’s southeast but now is an all-volunteer unit recruiting nationally.
An Azov officer on Monday confirmed to Kyiv Post the unit would be strengthened to corps size. Plans to give the formation strong artillery, reconnaissance and signal units are going forward, but it likely will be months before Azov is a full-strength corps, he said.
The 3rd Assault Brigade, an untrained civilian territorial defense unit in Kyiv, on the second day of the full-scale Russian invasion, helped hold off the Russian assault on Kyiv and went on to become a skilled assault unit fighting on practically every sector of the front.
Its leader, a regional nationalist politician named Andriy Biletsky, commanded small units during Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine. In February 2024, the 3rd executed one of the AFU’s first brigade-sized covering operations, successfully extracting another brigade trapped by Russian forces in the Donetsk region city of Avdiivka. A brigade officer on Monday confirmed to Kyiv Post the unit would be strengthened to corps size.
The 13th Khartiia National Guard Brigade started the war as armed civilians in Kharkiv. Thanks to strong support from the Kharkiv business community, the then-untrained formation ambushed and destroyed early Russian attempts to take over Ukraine’s second-largest city. Brigade commander Ihor Obolensky is a former special forces operator who, at that time, was a civilian employed as a business manager.
Reflagged as a Territorial Defense brigade, the 13th went on to fight in hot sectors across the front, most prominently during the six-month Battle of Bakhmut. Thanks to high standards and a solid resource stream, the 13th is by reputation one of the AFU’s most professionally run brigades. Most soldiers are recruited in the northeast of the country and are volunteers.
The 92nd Mechanized Brigade, an exception, is one of the AFU’s oldest regular army formations, with years of combat experience in the Donbas during the 2014-2021 period, the 92nd met Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 in the northern Kharkiv sector.
During running, mobile battles in late February and March the heavily outnumbered 92nd mobile units halted and at times cut to pieces major Russian tank assaults. Like 3rd Assault, the 92nd became a “fire brigade” unit deployed by AFU leadership as a high-skill quick reaction force dispatched to threatened sectors. The 92nd was among the first AFU brigades to incorporate a Foreign Legion sub-unit into its ranks and to field a dedicated strike drone section.
An officer inside the Ukrainian navy’s marine community confirmed to Kyiv Post that the nascent 30th Marine Corps will form up by combining four existing marine brigades – 35th, 36th, 37th and 38th – and beefing them up with support units and expanded headquarters.
The backbone of the 30th, the best-known, oldest and most experienced of Ukraine’s Marine brigades is the 36th, which fought during the epic Mariupol Siege in 2022, and led an ambitious amphibious operation across the Dnipro River in 2023-24, he said.
Reportedly, the administrative 7th Rapid Reaction Corps of the Air Assault Forces will be split into two combat-capable corps. Currently, an air assault designation in the AFU is an honorific carried by select, regular army units with higher recruiting standards and a more professional command structure, but despite the name, not trained to operate by aircraft or parachute. Battle records of six (46th, 79th, 80th, 81st, 82nd and 95th) are similar to standout units like the old army 92nd Mech and the National Guard 12th and 13th.
A Tuesday report in Ukrainska Pravda magazine cited a Jan. 11 Sysrky order ordering a total 50,000 men from other branches into the ground forces, as part of the plan to build up corps formations. A top objective of the fill-up is to give corps enough manpower to be able to rotate brigades in and out of the fighting line, the report said.
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