Armed Forces of Ukraine
combined military forces of Ukraine
The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU; Ukrainian: Збройні сили України, romanised: Zbroini syly Ukrainy, pronounced [ˈzbrɔjn⁽ʲ⁾i ˈsɪlɪ ʊkrɐˈjinɪ]) are the military forces of Ukraine. They consist of the three branches: the Ground Forces, the Air Force and the Navy, and a number of separately organized forces and specialized support commands: the Air Assault Forces, the Marine Corps, the Special Operations Forces, the Unmanned Systems Forces, the Territorial Defence Forces, the Medical Forces, Support Forces, Logistics Forces and the Communications and Cybersecurity Troops. Ukraine's navy includes its own Naval Aviation, and the National Guard serves as a paramilitary reserve component of the Armed Forces. With a total strength of 4.9 million, the AFU is the fifth largest armed force in the world.
Military units of other countries have participated regularly in multinational military exercises in Ukraine, with many of these exercises being held under the NATO cooperation programme Partnership for Peace. Due to the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, the Ukrainian Armed Forces has been described as "the most battle-hardened in Europe".
According to the IISS, the AFU had the world's eighth largest defence budget in 2025. It operates one of the largest and most diverse drone fleets in the world. Its Soviet era military equipment is currently being replaced with NATO standard military equipment.
History
The formation of the national armed forces in the modern sense dates back to the beginning of the twentieth century and coincides with the formation of the modern Ukrainian nation.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Armed Forces of Ukraine” as combined military forces of Ukraine. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as combined military forces of Ukraine. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q936105. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “Armed Forces of Ukraine” 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.