A Fractious Bunch of Ammo-Starved Right-Wingers Wearing Ukrainian Army Uniforms Defends the Most Vulnerable Town in Ukraine
Meet the 67th Mechanized Brigade
Get to know the Ukrainian army’s 67th Mechanized Brigade. It’s about to become the most important Ukrainian formation in Russia’s 26-month wider war on Ukraine.
That’s because the 67th Brigade garrisons the canal district in Chasiv Yar, just a few miles west of the ruins of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. The canal district is the most vulnerable corner of one of the most vulnerable strategic towns as the commanders of Russia’s winter-spring offensive aim for their second big victory following the destruction of Avdiivka in mid-February.
Chasiv Yar, an industrial town with a pre-war population of around 12,000, controls the terrain east of Kostyantynivka and Kramators'k, two of the last free cities in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. “If Ukraine were to lose control of Chasiv Yar, it could have dire consequences,” Ukrainian analysis group Frontelligence Insight explained.
A canal abuts Chasiv Yar to the east. Only the town’s canal district—a roughly 20-block clutch of homes and industrial sites surrounded by forest—lies on the east side of the canal. The canal is a natural defensive barrier, except where it passes through wide pipes that make it easier to cross. Control the canal district, and you can control the canal’s easiest crossings—and the vectors into central Chasiv Yar.
On paper, the 67th Brigade—a volunteer formation with ties to the Ukrainian far right that formed in late 2022—should have 2,000 or so troops along with T-64 and T-72 tanks, armored trucks, do-it-yourself tank-destroyers, M-119 howitzers and at least one TOS-1 thermobaric launcher it captured from the Russians.
In reality, the brigade’s strength probably is much lower than that. The brigade like all active Ukrainian brigades has suffered casualties in its many months along the front line and may also struggle to recruit enough fresh recruits to make good its losses. Moreover, the 67th Brigade is a fractious unit, with deep internal political divisions that recently resulted in one whole battalion quitting the unit.
In late January, a medical unit as well as an assault company assigned to the 67th Brigade’s 1st Assault Company—a kind of elite infantry unit specializing in close combat—split from the 1st Company and reportedly joined the 59th Mechanized Brigade.
Militaryland.net, which closely tracks Ukrainian combat units, chalked up the schism to “personal issues with the command of 67th Mechanized Brigade.”
The 67th Brigade can’t afford to lose more force structure, not when it’s clinging to defensive positions in a thousand-foot-by-thousand-foot district that’s under relentless bombardment by Russian glide-bombs, rockets and siege mortars.
The canal district already is under direct assault by Russian tanks and infantry. The assaults likely will escalate as the Russians shrug off cataclysmic losses and barrel toward their second big win of their 2024 offensive. “Urban combat operations may soon begin in Chasiv Yar,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies warned.
Internal squabbles aren’t the brigade’s biggest problem, of course. No, its biggest problem is the most obvious one: a desperate shortage of artillery ammunition and air-defense missiles resulting from Russia-aligned Republicans in the U.S. Congress blocking further U.S. aid to Ukraine starting in October.
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