Quote Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
Ukraine Army's 30th Mech. Bgde. returns to their N-W. UA garrison town after the 3-years duty tour in #Donbass. 141 men & women lost.

30h Mech Bde has been in the thick of the fighting since it began in 2014.....

In 2014 they were fighting with little to no new equipment against well equipped Russian active duty armored forces......

Now they are well equipped and considered to be one of the best combat UAF units equal to anything on the US side now....after three years of ongoing and constant combat operations...the 71st Mech right behind them on the combat quality scale....

Overall UAF has reached a combat level that even Russian mercenary commanders admit can defeat them head to head if it were not for 100,000 Russian troops near Ukrainian borders....and this even though the mercenaries have had extensive Russian training and are equipped with modern Russia equipment....
Certainly, the Ukrainian Armed Forces outnumber the separatist forces 1.5-2:1, assuming that we are only counting Ukraine’s active and deployed forces. However, it would be a bridge too far to claim that the 30th or 71st Bdes are “equal to anything on the US side”, or even to the Russians.

With regard to the development of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, here is what Franklin Holcomb at the Institute for the Study of War had to say in December 2016:


  • The Ukrainian armed forces have been partially restructured and strengthened in the face of this constant pressure, enough to stabilize the front lines for a time. They require significantly more support of all varieties, however, if they are to stop the advance of Russia and its proxies permanently, to say nothing of reversing the armed occupation of Ukrainian territory.
  • These forces still suffer from a lack of modern equipment and from an incompletely reformed organizational structure. Ukrainian front-line soldiers have learned much from the protracted conflict and now outmatch separatist forces operating in eastern Ukraine.
  • The Armed Forces of Ukraine are in the midst of a transition from the Soviet structure on which they were based and remain inefficiently-organized. Ukrainian front-line troops also lack standardized modern weaponry. Ukraine’s defense sector remains highly productive, but the Armed Forces of Ukraine does not have the modern weaponry necessary to allow them to counter Russian military intervention. Ukrainian Ground Forces will be unable to provide a true deterrent to offensive action by regional aggressors until these problems are addressed.
  • The Ukrainian Air Force’s high vulnerability to even limited deployments of Russian anti-air systems raises serious concerns about its ability to fight against a conventional combined arms force.
  • The Ukrainian Navy is currently the weakest navy in the Black Sea region. It is weaker than the Russian Black Sea Fleet as well as the navies of NATO members Turkey, Romania, and Bulgaria, though is slightly stronger than the Georgian Coast Guard.
  • Ukraine’s Special Operations Command is still nascent, however, and Ukrainian special operations forces have yet to become a fully mature force.



Igor Sutyagin at the Royal United Services Institute assessed the presence of Russian forces operating in Donbas. The strength of Russian forces in Donbas rose from roughly 3,500 to 6,500 around August 2014 to 9,000 to 11,000, around December 2014 through February 2015. However, based upon estimates of insurgent strength, Russian forces never comprised more than 25% of the total forces arrayed against Ukraine, although they obviously were the best-equipped and trained.

Russia’s active presence in Donbas – as opposed to deployments along Ukraine’s borders and in Crimea – has always been a situation of water sloshing over the sides of a saucepan, rather than being dumped. Russia has fought the war with at least one hand tied behind its back. If the other hand were brought out, whether by way of full deployment or combined-arms (i.e. airpower), the Ukrainians would find themselves in all sorts of trouble to paraphrase Joe Rogan.