Ukraine's Most Useless Mechanized Brigade Is Still Disintegrating

The 155th Mechanized Brigade should be defending Pokrovsk. Instead, it's mired in criminal investigations, and losing soldiers to desertion.

The 155th Mechanized Brigade in training. 155th Mechanized Brigade photo

As a pair of Russian field armies, together overseeing 70,000 troops in dozens of regiments and brigades, bore down on Pokrovsk—a fortress city in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast—late last year, the Ukrainian army reinforced the city.

One of the reinforcing units, the newly formed 155th Mechanized Brigade, began disintegrating before it even arrived in the besieged city in November.

The brigade—one of the few equipped with with German-made Leopard 2 tanks and French-made Caesar howitzers—was supposed to have more than 5,800 troops, making it larger than most of the Ukrainian ground forces’ roughly 100 other combat brigades.

But some 1,700 of those 5,800 troops went absent without leave from the brigade at some point during its nine-month work-up in western Ukraine, Poland and France in 2024. As recently as November, around 500 soldiers were reportedly still AWOL.

The brigade was disintegrating as it deployed. And when it first made contact with the Russians outside Pokrovsk, it suffered heavy casualties—and may have lost some of its precious Leopard 2s. “The issue is in organizational and leadership failure,” explained Tatarigami, the founder of the Frontelligence Insight analysis group in Ukraine.

Six months later, the organizational and leadership failure have deepened. And the 155th Mechanized Brigade is still disintegrating.

State investigators recover the alleged fraudulent funds from the 155th Mechanized Brigade. State Bureau of Investigations photo

Deep corruption

According to an investigation by Ukrainian Pravda, a battalion commander in the 155th Mechanized Brigade has been illegally claiming combat bonuses, keeping much of the money for himself.

Army brass dismissed the 155th Mechanized Brigade’s commander, Col. Dmitry Ryumshin, and appointed Col. Taras Maksimov to replace him. Maksimov appointed new battalion commanders, many from his previous unit, the 24th Mechanized Brigade. The new battalion commanders included Lt. Col. Svyatoslav Shumsky, who took over the 155th Mechanized Brigade’s drone battalion.

Shumsky promptly organized a kickback scheme, according to Pravda. Falsely claiming his drone operators were on the line of contact, Shumsky collected combat bonuses from the army—and then kept much of the bonuses for himself.

The scheme generated $22,200 in March. “He planned to receive the same amount in April, but was caught red-handed,” the State Bureau of Investigation reported in early May.

Shumsky is now under arrest in Kyiv. Gen. Mykhailo Drapaty, the commander of the Ukrainian ground forces, has ordered an official military investigation of the 155th Mechanized Brigade.

Tragically for the 155th Mechanized Brigade’s rank and file, the alleged kickback scheme didn’t benefit the drone battalion or the infantry the battalion is supposed to support. The brigade has been desperately short of first-person-view drones since its formation.

“Our guys sit in positions for two to three days without drones,” a 155th Mechanized Brigade drone operator told Pravda. “Zero support. Fighters from a neighboring brigade get drones delivered in trucks, but we don’t get any. And then Maksimov asks why FPVs don’t fly? And where can we get them?”

“We try to buy them ourselves or exchange them from other units, but we can’t meet our needs on our own,” the source continued. “This doesn’t help anyone. The brigade commander just says, ‘You are a stupid unit. You need to be disbanded and thrown into the infantry.’”

Given the utter dysfunction in the allegedly criminal brigade, it’s no wonder that desertions continue. Since the beginning of this year, 1,200 soldiers from the 155th Mechanized Brigade have gone AWOL.

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