A 155th Mechanized Brigade tank crew in training.
Ukrainian defense ministry photo
A pair of Russian field armies, together overseeing 70,000 troops in dozens of regiments and brigades, is bearing down on Pokrovsk, a fortress city in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast.
Bracing for the coming assault, the culmination of a Russian offensive that began more than a year ago, the Ukrainians are reinforcing Pokrovsk. But one of the reinforcing units, the newly formed 155th Mechanized Brigade—one of the few Ukrainian brigades with German-made Leopard 2 tanks and French-made Caesar howitzers—began disintegrating before it even arrived in the besieged city last week.
The brigade was supposed to have more than 5,800 troops, making it much larger than most of the Ukrainian ground forces’ roughly 100 other combat brigades. But around 1,700 of those 5,800 troops went absent without leave from the brigade at some point during its nine-month work-up in western Ukraine, Poland and France. As recently as November, nearly 500 soldiers were reportedly still AWOL.
“The issue is in organizational and leadership failure,” according to Tatarigami, the founder of the Frontelligence Insight analysis group in Ukraine. Under Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky, military leaders including commander-in-chief Gen. Oleksandr Stanislavovych Syrskyi have prioritized forming new novice brigades—at least 14 of them—over replenishing existing veteran brigades that, after 34 months of hard fighting, might be down to half or less of their original strength.
But the new brigades are dysfunctional—with uneven leadership, missing equipment and entire battalions of undertrained, ambivalently led new recruits who have a bad habit of abandoning their brigade at the first opportunity. Rolling into battle outside Pokrovsk in recent days, the 155th Mechanized Brigade suffered heavy casualties, reportedly even losing some of its tanks and other armored vehicles.
Those troops and tanks would have stood a better chance fighting under experienced brigades, according to Lt. Col. Bohdan Krotevych, chief of staff of the Ukrainian National Guard’s Azov Brigade. “Can it be idiocy to create new brigades and equip them with such equipment, having incomplete existing ones?” Krotevych asked.
It’s not necessarily idiocy—it’s politics. Under pressure to demonstrate to Ukraine’s ficklest allies that Ukraine still has reserves of strength and the capacity to keep fighting, Zelensky and his top generals have done the showy thing: formed new brigades. They’ve done it even though it might make more military sense to replenish older brigades with fresh troops and equipment.
“The country’s top political and military leadership actually played with the 155th [Mechanized] Brigade, without even trying to systematically prepare and train the brigade, and without giving the brigade commanders time to create a combat-ready team themselves,” Ukrainian war correspondent Yuriy Butusov wrote.
Ironically, the 155th Mechanized Brigade’s disastrous first days in combat compelled Ukrainian leaders to do with the brigade’s surviving troops and equipment what Tatarigami and Krotevych insisted they should have done from the outset: assign these forces to well-established brigades in the Pokrovsk area.
But that won’t bring back the people and tanks the 155th Mechanized Brigade lost last week.
