5th Guards Combined Arms Army
military unit
The 5th Guards Combined Arms Red Banner Order of Zhukov Army (5-я гвардейская общевойсковая Краснознамённая, ордена Жукова армия) is a Russian Ground Forces formation in the Eastern Military District.
It was formed in 1939, served during the Soviet invasion of Poland that year, and was deployed in the southern sector of the Soviet defences when Adolf Hitler's Operation Barbarossa began in June 1941 during World War II. In the disastrous first months of Barbarossa, the 5th Army was encircled and destroyed around Kiev.
Reformed under Lelyushenko and Govorov, it played a part in the last-ditch defence of Moscow, and then in the string of offensive and defensive campaigns that eventually saw the Soviet armies retake all of Soviet territory and push west into Poland and beyond into Germany itself. The 5th Army itself only advanced as far as East Prussia before it was moved east to take part in the Soviet attack on Japan.
Since 1945, under the Soviet and now Russian flag it has formed part of the Far East Military District keeping watch on the border with the People's Republic of China. As the Russian armed force shrank, it found itself part of the larger Eastern Military District in the twenty-first century.
On December 2, 2021, the 5th Army was awarded the Order of Zhukov.
On February 19, 2024, the 25th NBC Protection Regiment was awarded the honorary designation "Guards".
On the 1st of April, 2024, the 5th Army was awarded the honorary designation "Guards".
Creation and organization
The 5th Army was created in August 1939 in the Special Kiev Military District from the Northern (originally Shepetovskaya) Army Group.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4031627. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1939, 1941, 1945 and 2021.
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This entry incorporates text from “5th Guards Combined Arms Army” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.