Most Ukrainian Brigades Have Too Few Troops And Tanks. Not The 125th Heavy Mechanized Brigade.

The brigade has been on the attack since March.

A T-64 tank in service with the 125th Heavy Mechanized Brigade. 125th Heavy Mechanized Brigade photo.

by DAVID AXE

In four months of deft maneuver, the Ukrainian 3rd Army Corps cleared Russian troops from 277 sq km of northern Donetsk Oblast, inflicting—according to the corps—8,000 casualties on the Russian 20th and 25th Combined Arms Armies and chasing the armies back across a key terrain feature, the Zherebets River.

There are many reasons for the success of the 3rd Army Corps’ Operation Vivaldi—which the corps declared finished on Oct. 19, though elements reportedly keep pushing across the Zherebets to the river’s eastern bank.

But one reason is becoming clearer. Bucking a worrying trend, the 3rd Army Corps under its former commander Brig. Gen. Andrii Biletskyi actually managed to nearly fill out at least one of its five line brigades. The 125th Heavy Mechanized Brigade‘s main units—three infantry and tank battalions, which make up around half the overall brigade—have filled between 95% and 100% of their allotted billets, the brigade says.

That means the brigade rolls into battle with as many as 1,500 infantry and vehicle crew. (A battalion typically has around 500 personnel.)

That’s highly unusual. Almost all of the roughly 150 ground combat brigades in the Ukrainian armed forces have too few infantry. “Ukraine faces manpower shortage and still does not have a single brigade that is fully manned,” analyst Giorgi Revishvili wrote in June. Some brigades are effectively battalions given their stubbornly low manning.

The 125th Heavy Mechanized Brigade—commanded by Maj. Volodymyr Fokin—may be one exception to that truism. And if you believe the brigade’s own claims, the unit not only has nearly all of its allotted infantry, it also has an abundance of heavy equipment including American-made M-2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and German-made Leopard tanks. (It’s unclear whether they’re Leopard 1s or heavier Leopard 2s.) The 125th Heavy Mechanized Brigade’s line battalions should possess around 90 armored vehicles between them.

“3rd Army Corps is built different,” observer Moklasen quipped. The corps grew out of the 3rd Assault Brigade, whose soldiers described it as a new army modeled on the freedom-loving Cossacks rather than on the regulations.

The 125th Heavy Mechanized Brigade wasn’t always so fit. Indeed, as recently as a year ago it was just 17% manned and lacked heavy equipment, the brigade says, making it more typical of the younger Ukrainian brigades including the notoriously “poor” 29th Heavy Mechanized Brigade.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.