The Ukrainian Army's 67th Brigade Had An Extremism Problem. So the Defense Ministry Took the Brigade Apart.
After repeated reassignments, there's not much left of the once-critical unit.
The Ukrainian defense ministry reportedly has removed 1,500 soldiers with far-right ties from the army’s 67th Mechanized Brigade—and scattered them across other units.
The transfer, involving the majority of the 67th Brigade’s approximately 2,000 troops, might be the last stage of the ministry’s long effort to root out extremism in the brigade. Whether and when the unit will return to full strength is an open question.
For a long time, the 67th Brigade was a problem. The volunteer unit formed around a core group of fighters from Right Sector, a loose alliance of Ukrainian right-wing extremists with racist and nationalist views.
Right Sector’s former leader, Dmytro Yarosh, said he draws inspiration from Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist who resisted Soviet rule in the 1940s and ’50s, but who is also considered a Nazi collaborator.
The extreme politicization of the 67th Brigade’s command staff undermined its combat capability. In late January, a medical unit as well as an unit assigned to the 67th Brigade’s assault company split from the 67th and reportedly joined the 59th Mechanized Brigade.
The defense ministry in Kyiv investigated. It discovered, among other scandals, that the 67th Brigade’s officers were sending new recruits—those without ties to Right Sector—into combat with inadequate training and support.
The drama inside the 67th Brigade might not have mattered so much, were the brigade not holding one of the most critical sectors of the 700-mile front line of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine: the canal district of Chasiv Yar, in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast.
In April, the Ukrainian general staff redeployed the 67th Brigade from the canal district to a quieter sector farther north. There, officials got to work cleaning up the unit.
They began by reassigning any brigade leaders with Right Sector ties. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, commander-in-chief of Ukrainian forces, defended the changes, stressing “the need to improve the quality of training, including the moral and psychological component.”
Three months later, the 67th lost most of its rank-and-file troops. The reassigned soldiers might still hold far-right views, but at least now the extremists are spread thin—and barred from the echo chamber of a politicized brigade.
The alternative may have been totally to dismantle the 67th Brigade. Note that, in 2020, the German government disbanded part of the 1,300-person KSK counterterrorism unit after an investigation uncovered far-right ties among 20 KSK members.
The Ukrainian defense ministry’s intervention in the troubled Chasiv Yar garrison is laudable—but it didn’t save the vulnerable canal district. Russian troops finally occupied the exposed neighborhood this month following intensive bombardment that rendered it indefensible.
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