Frag Out! Magazine
Issue link: https://fragout.uberflip.com/i/1536266
stries or to no one at all. Meanwhile, the regular army, under cover of these units, could concentrate its necessary forces and launch the counterattack that, in summer 2014, succeeded in Donbas. Only then did the Russian army respond with mobilization of its own forces and their direct use at the end of summer 2014, which in turn halted Ukrainian advances. Ukraine's initially dysfunctional mobilization system had to be reorganized and supplemented with personnel to meet the challenges of partial mobilization in 2014–2015. In the following years, the Armed Forces of Ukraine underwent extensive expan- sion, nearly doubling in both number of units and total personnel. A process of standardizing unit structures also took place: many volunteer formations were integrated into existing units or used as the basis for new mechanized and motorized brigades. Examining this process and comparing it to the Ukrainian army's processes and problems in 2025, one easily feels a certain déjà vu. In 2022, the Russian invasion sparked a wave of volunteers eager to join the armed forces. The army could not absorb them all quickly, so some joined the newly formed Ter- ritorial Defense Brigades, while others formed numerous independent volun- teer detachments. These units were partly composed of completely new recruits and partly of Donbas war ve- terans who had left the service before 2022, giving Ukraine a substantial pool of experienced reservists. Under the cover of and supported by this flood of volunteers, the regular army managed to stop the Russians on the northern front, prompting the latter to with- draw and concentrate on the southern and eastern fronts. In 2022, similarly to 2014, the volunteer support gave the AFU time to mobilize the so‑called Reserve Corps, created after 2015 for just such a direct Russian attack sce- nario. It comprised a range of cadre tank, mechanized, and artillery briga- des, which, in the event of aggression or imminent threat, had to be rapidly filled out with reservists to reinforce or rotate front‑line units. Fighting on the northeastern axis north of Kharkiv and around Chernihiv clearly demonstrated how crucial the volunteer light infantry units were to the regular brigades. In those cases, the AFU brigades often served as the core of groupings sup- plemented by a large number of smaller volunteer detachments attacking Rus- sian rear areas and logistics, employing guerrilla‑style tactics against Russian armored columns. Reserve Corps units arrived at the front gradually in 2022, and it was largely their support that swiftly strengthened the AFU's com- bat potential, contributing to Ukrainian successes by late summer and autumn that year. However, as with Ukraine's successes in Donbas in spring–summer 2014, these 2022 gains forced Russia to mobilize its own forces and resour- ces to stop further Ukrainian advances and wrest the initiative from the AFU. Fortunately, that did not lead to a cata- strophic Ukrainian defeat like the one in late summer 2014. It became clear to the Ukrainian army that future success would require engaging much larger forces and would be more difficult than initially thought. This realization trigge- red a rapid numerical expansion of the Ukrainian army—both in the number of sub‑units within existing brigades (to the extent that some began to resem- ble divisions in size) and through cre- ation of entirely new units, echoing the Donbas war processes. A new stage of unit‑structure unification also began, incorporating various independent vo- lunteer groups into regular units or, more often, forming new units based on those volunteer detachments. All these changes gave rise to a series of problems similar to those during the Donbas‑era army reorganizations—but on a scale proportional to the current war's intensity and the AFU's growth. Let us look at the most important of the issues currently confronting the Ukra- inian army. 1. WAR INTENSITY AND DIFFICUL- TIES RESTORING COMBAT CAPABI- LITY In my view, a key problem causing the gradual degradation of many Ukrainian brigades' combat capability is the ina- bility to restore those capabilities after sustaining losses. In a war of this in- tensity, that is one of the decisive factors determining an army's ability to continue fighting over time without collapse. The Ukrainian "old" brigades often remain on the front line too long, irretrievably losing valuable non‑com- missioned officers and officers. Delayed withdrawal makes rebuilding harder, more time‑consuming, and incapable of fully restoring the unit's pre‑loss level. Multiple objective and subjective fac- tors contribute to this situation. During the Donbas war, that problem was solved only when fighting inten- sity fell and the front line stabilized. Continuous rotation allowed full unit replenishment combined with intensive soldier and officer training. Relatively small losses meant that unit cohesion and experience steadily increased. In 2025, the war's intensity is incompa- rably higher—that is the first objec- tive factor causing far larger losses in Ukrainian units. The dysfunctional mobilization system often cannot simul- taneously provide personnel for both newly formed units being trained from scratch and to replace losses at the front, which further deepens the bri- gades' restoration issue. Forming new units also erodes the cadre of "old" brigades, as command pulls officers and NCOs to staff new brigades, weakening the originals and reducing their cohe- sion and combat potential. Among the subjective factors is the po- litical leadership's approach to the war: especially in its early stages, when the Ukrainian government openly sought a swift end and wished to avoid a war of attrition. Such an approach itself for- ced the army to plan for maximum ef- fort to secure a decisive victory, rather than pursue a gradual, conservative capability buildup that would avoid ex- cessive losses—thus contributing to over‑exertion of fighting units. Under this stance, continuously forming new units was driven by the need for fre- sh forces for offensives, often at the expense of suffering, frontline "old" bri- gades, whose combat potential declined with the permanent loss of their most experienced soldiers. ANALYSIS