Why New Ukrainian Brigades Will Provide the Mass, But Old Ones Will Lead

As the expected Ukrainian counteroffensive gets closer, much has been written about Ukraine's newly formed assault brigades. 

And while they provide much needed new blood, experienced formations are likely to lead the attack precisely because of their hard-earned skill. JL

David Axe reports in Forbes:

While the bulk of the Ukrainian army holds the line against the Russian army’s failing winter offensive in eastern and southern Ukraine, a dozen new Ukrainian brigades are standing up, mostly in the relative safety of western Ukraine..The Ukrainian general staff is saving these brigades for its long-planned 2023 counteroffensive. But while the deployment of new brigades might signal the beginning of the counteroffensive, old brigades might do most of the hard fighting the offensive requires. So while new formations would bulk up the counteroffensive force, they might not lead it.While the bulk of the Ukrainian army holds the line against the Russian army’s failing winter offensive in eastern and southern Ukraine, as many as a dozen new Ukrainian brigades are standing up, mostly in the relative safety of western Ukraine.

The Ukrainian general staff is saving these brigades for its long-planned 2023 counteroffensive. When one or more of them finally shows up on the front line, it’s safe to assume the counterattack has begun.

But while the deployment of new brigades might signal the beginning of the counteroffensive, old brigades might do most of the hard fighting the offensive requires.

That’s because the Ukrainians seem to be equipping their newest brigades with some of their oldest weaponry.

The 33rd Mechanized Brigade is representative of these new formations, which also include the 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 31st and 32nd Mechanized Brigades, the 47th Assault Brigade, three reinforced territorial brigades and a new air-assault brigade, the 82nd.

The 33rd actually unfurled its colors back in 2016, during the Ukrainian army’s initial expansion in response to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. But for seven years, the brigade had little or no actual manpower.

 

That changed early this year. The 33rd and other new brigades began receiving troops and equipment: two or three thousand troops and hundreds of vehicles apiece. Concentrating around Lviv in western Ukraine, the brigades started training for the coming counteroffensive.

The stakes are enormous. The Ukrainian general staff made a deliberate decision to keep its older, and increasingly war-weary, brigades on the front line through Russia’s winter offensive, which peaked last month in the ruins of Bakhmut, in Donbas.

The old brigades—the 92nd and 93rd Mechanized Brigades, the 25th and 80th Air Assault Brigades and many others—held the line, at enormous cost in people and equipment, in order to buy time for the new brigades to get ready.

“May the soldiers in the trenches forgive me,” Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s top officer, told The Economist in late December. “It’s more important to focus on the accumulation of resources right now for the more protracted and heavier battles that may begin next year.”

Which is not to say the veteran brigades won’t participate in the counteroffensive. The Ukrainian defense ministry has decided to assign many of the hundreds of new tanks and fighting vehicles it’s getting from its foreign allies to its older units—likely in an effort to match its best troops with the best new equipment.

The veteran 4th Tank Brigade is getting Leopard 2 tanks, for example. The equally battle-hardened 25th and 80th Air Assault Brigades are getting Challenger 2 tanks.

If the older brigades were to sit out the coming counteroffensive, their Challenger 2s and Leopard 2s and Marder and CV90 fighting vehicles would sit it out, too.

There are exceptions, of course. Take the unique 47th Assault Brigade, which has been training around Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine. It’s equipped with an eclectic mix of American-made M-2A2 fighting vehicles and ex-Slovenian M-55S tanks that the brigade probably plans to use as mobile guns for urban fighting.

But the 33rd Mechanized Brigade and its sister units training around Lviv appear mostly to use the same old ex-Soviet weaponry that has accounted for the bulk of the Ukrainian army’s equipment since 1991. T-72 tanks. BMP-2 fighting vehicles. BM-21 rocket-launchers.

All that is to say, the Ukrainian forces in Kyiv’s counteroffensive will be a mix. New, inexperienced brigades with old, low-tech equipment. Old, experienced brigades with new, high-tech equipment.

It’s not hard to guess which units probably will be at the vanguard of the attack. So while new formations would bulk up the counteroffensive force, they might not lead it.