Foreign trained Ukrainian brigade falls apart when deployed and sees massive desertions. I bring you the tale of the 155th that trained in France.
>Ukraine trying to secure French armaments agrees to send a 2k soldier brigade to France for training, which included specialized training on French hardware such as Mistral air defense, Caesar howitzers & other
>During training hundreds of soldiers desert because in reality, the unit is made up of mostly forcibly mobilized unwilling men which have no motivation or cohesion. Or as Butusov refers to them 'busified' as most of these are people that were thrown in minibuses by groups of armed recruiters.
>The head of the brigade gets replaced for this with new commanders taking when the unit comes back
>The unit under new command gets sent to Pokrovsk front, currently one of the most active fronts with Russia making rapid advances
>The unit suffers over 1000 desertions (some sources say it was as high as 1700), again because it's mostly made up of forcibly mobilized men which have no interest in fighting
>Basically all the specialized training was for naught
>Ukraine has now launched a criminal investigation into the formation of the unit
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Col. Dmytro Ryumshin left command of the 155th Mechanized Brigade on Dec. 12. The formation had been created in mid-2024 and was formed, armed and trained exclusively in French training bases from August to November.
The 155th had been profiled by both French and Ukrainian government media as powerful combat element of 2,000 men armed with French-donated AMX 10 light tanks, 128 armored fighting vehicles and 18 CAESAR self-propelled howitzers, one of the most effective artillery systems operational in the Russo-Ukrainian War.
Ryumshin in a short statement posted on the brigade Facebook page said he was thankful to soldiers, NCOs and officers for their “loyalty and professionalism,” and said it had been an honor to train with them. The unit would go to the fighting line “soon,” he said.
Butusov claimed that “almost 1,000” soldiers deserted from the brigade, but did not provide evidence. A Kyiv Post request for comment to Ukraine’s Defense Ministry had not been responded to by the time this article was published.
Maryana Bezuhla, a Ukrainian MP often critical of military inefficiency, in Dec. 11 comments said the 155th was critically short of automobiles, electronic warfare equipment, observation and FPV drones, and that soldiers and officers were forced to fill those gaps at their own personal expense, or with the help of grass roots-funded volunteer groups. The Defense Ministry was failing to deliver to the unit even a minimum of basic military material, she claimed.
Paris-issued Mistral air defense systems and Milan anti-tank missile systems issued to the 155th in France, and trained on by dedicated missile teams at French firing ranges, were no longer combat-capable because army command had yanked those weapons systems operators out of the brigade, and made them operators of Soviet-era Igla or American Stinger hand-held anti-aircraft missiles in other units, Bezuhla said.
“The commander has been dismissed,” Bezuhla wrote. “Chaos is reigning within the brigade.”
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/43953From another source:
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Butusov blames the leaders of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief's Headquarters, the Ministry of Defense, and the General Staff, "who continue to waste lives and state funds on new projects, instead of strengthening experienced and combat-ready brigades. And they are trying to avoid responsibility and put it to the officers in a hopeless situation who have to conduct a political project poorly organized by the top leadership," he writes.
The problem is that instead of training new fighters and replenishing existing brigades which already have experienced leadership, Zelensky came up with a plan for our NATO allies to form 14 new brigades, for the creation of which there were no commanders and leader stuff, says Butusov.
The cost of creating a new brigade in France is estimated at 900 million euros – 80% of these funds were to be invested directly in technical equipment and the process of training fighters. France has fully fulfilled all obligations to arm and train the brigade, the journalist emphasizes.
https://mind.ua/en/news/20283373-journalist-butusov-told-about-the-catastrophic-situation-in-the-155th-brigade-anna-de-kyiv-which-waThis post was edited by ofthevoid on Jan 1 2025 09:48am