In June 1944, the 5th Guards Tank Army was used as the main exploitation force during the Soviet summer offensive, Operation Bagration.

The formation was committed to an attack along and parallel to the main Moscow–Minsk road, following initial breakthroughs by the rifle divisions of 11th Guards Army, and was instrumental in completing the encirclement and destruction of German forces at Minsk.

It was then moved south and took part in the East Prussian Operation as part of Konstantin Rokossovsky's 2nd Belorussian Front; driving to the coast at Elbing, it successfully cut off the Wehrmacht forces in East Prussia in what became known as the Heiligenbeil pocket.

[3] This reduction in strength coincided with the hospitalization of the 5th GTA's commanding general, Vasily Volsky, for tuberculosis.

[4] Volsky did not return to the army (he died in February 1946) and Major General Maxim Sinenko took command from 16 March 1945 to the end of the war.

[7] The unit was expanded into the 5th Guards Mechanized Army on 28 October 1948 as Cold War tensions increased.

From then until the late 1980s the army's composition remained virtually unchanged – only the mechanized divisions were redesignated in 1957.

[6] Until the late 1980s, the army included three tank divisions – the 8th Guards at Marina Gorka, the 29th at Slutsk, and the 193rd at Bobruisk-25.

[8] In 1990, as the Cold War drew to a close, the 8th Guards and 29th Tank Divisions were reduced to storage bases.

By November of that year, according to CFE Treaty data, the army fielded 238 T-72 tanks, 381 infantry fighting vehicles, and 228 guns, mortars, and MLRS.

[10][11] There is a memorial to the soldiers of the 5th Guards Tank Army at Znamianka, Kirovograd Oblast, in Ukraine.