Jump to navigation Jump to search “Russian Army” redirects here. The primary responsibilities of the Ground Forces are the russian army single of the state borders, combat on land, the security of occupied territories, and the defeat of enemy troops. The training of troops for combat, on the basis of tasks determined by the Armed Forces’ General Staff.
The improvement of troops’ structure and composition, and the optimization of their numbers, including for special troops. The development of military theory and practice. The development and introduction of training field manuals, tactics, and methodology. The improvement of operational and combat training of the Ground Forces. Lesser Coat of Arms of Russian Empire. As the Soviet Union dissolved, efforts were made to keep the Soviet Armed Forces as a single military structure for the new Commonwealth of Independent States. Russian president Boris Yeltsin signed a decree forming the Russian Ministry of Defence on 7 May 1992, establishing the Russian Ground Forces along with the other branches of the military.
Thirty-seven divisions had to be withdrawn from the four groups of forces and the Baltic States, and four military districts—totalling 57 divisions—were handed over to Belarus and Ukraine. Some idea of the scale of the withdrawal can be gained from the division list. The Ministry of Defence newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda published a reform plan on 21 July 1992. Later one commentator said it was “hastily” put together by the General Staff “to satisfy the public demand for radical changes. Few of the reforms planned in the early 1990s eventuated, for three reasons: Firstly, there was an absence of firm civilian political guidance, with President Yeltsin primarily interested in ensuring that the Armed Forces were controllable and loyal, rather than reformed.
Secondly, declining funding worsened the progress. A British military expert, Michael Orr, claims that the hierarchy had great difficulty in fully understanding the changed situation, due to their education. As graduates of Soviet military academies, they received great operational and staff training, but in political terms they had learned an ideology, rather than a wide understanding of international affairs. The Ground Forces reluctantly became involved in the Russian constitutional crisis of 1993 after President Yeltsin issued an unconstitutional decree dissolving the Parliament, following the Parliament’s resistance to Yeltsin’s consolidation of power and his neo-liberal reforms.
When the attack was finally mounted, forces from five different divisions around Moscow were used, and the personnel involved were mostly officers and senior non-commissioned officers. There were also indications that some formations deployed into Moscow only under protest. The Chechen people had never willingly accepted Russian rule. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Chechens declared independence in November 1991, under the leadership of a former Air Forces officer, General Dzhokar Dudayev. The operation began on 11 December 1994 and, by 31 December, Russian forces were entering Grozny, the Chechen capital.
