BTR-80s belonging to the 126th Guards Coastal Protection Brigade on a prepare from Crimea in August.
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When Russian troops invaded Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in February 2014, the Ukrainian navy forces on the strategic peninsula within the Black Sea principally melted away. However hundreds of Ukrainian troops surrendered—and lots of of them defected.
When an estimated 700 members of a Ukrainian marine brigade modified sides, the Kremlin noticed a chance. It re-equipped the defectors and folded them into a brand new Russian navy coastal-defense brigade.
The 126th Guards Coastal Protection Brigade … didn’t final lengthy. It reportedly is likely one of the victims of the Ukrainian navy’s month-old counteroffensive in southern Ukraine. A counteroffensive that rapidly is constructing momentum.
The 126th GCDB was distinctive. And never just for the lots of of defectors who crammed its billets. Whereas all of the Russian navy’s regional fleets have marine battalions and brigades for coastal operations and amphibious assaults, the 126th is the one coastal-defense brigade.
Its three infantry battalions, single tank battalion and supporting engineer, air-defense and artillery items—collectively amounting to round 2,000 troops—in kind and performance are, or have been, extra akin to a military formation than they’re a marine formation. The 126th Guards Coastal Protection Brigade is the navy’s military.
Technically, the126th GCDB belongs to the Russian navy’s Black Sea Fleet, which sails from Sevastopol in occupied Crimea. Its job, in peacetime, is to safeguard the Black Sea Fleet’s intensive infrastructure on the peninsula.
However when Russia widened its warfare on Ukraine beginning in late February, the 126th GCDB rolled into southern Ukraine beneath the banner of the Russian twenty second Army Corps, a grouping of two naval brigades and supporting battalions.
Placing north from Crimea, the invaders rapidly captured the port of Kherson then barreled towards Mykolaiv, the place they ran headlong into stiffening Ukrainian defenses. The 126th GCDB suffered heavy casualties across the metropolis of Voznesensk. The Russians pulled again from Mykolaiv, finally consolidating their strains simply north of Kherson.
The southern entrance froze, for months, with neither aspect making any large strikes. Then in Might, the Ukrainian military—newly re-armed with American-made rocket-launchers—started plucking on the provide strains throughout southern Ukraine, progressively eroding the power of the twenty second Army Corps and the adjoining, and far larger, forty ninth Mixed Arms Army.
4 months later within the final week of August, Ukrainian brigades attacked south from a number of lodgements alongside the southern entrance line, together with a hard-won bridgehead on the left financial institution of the Inhulets River. Kyiv deliberate this southern counteroffensive to coincide with a separate counteroffensive within the east.
The jap assault moved rapidly. The southern assault, in contrast, took a couple of weeks to get traction on the open panorama of the nation’s southern breadbasket—tough terrain for any attacker.
The Ukrainians within the south superior alongside a minimum of three axes. The Ukrainian military’s seventeenth Tank Brigade rolled towards Kherson from the west, whereas the Ukrainian navy’s thirty fifth Marine Brigade punched south from the Inhulets bridgehead and the military’s 128th Mountain Brigade marched south alongside the huge Dnipro River.
Within the jap sector of the southern entrance, between the Inhulets and Dnipro, Ukrainian forces met the 126th GCDB—and located it weak. The brigade’s troopers reportedly had been of their foxholes for six months with no aid, and with fewer and fewer provides owing to Ukrainian deep strikes on bridges, railways and depots.
Plus, the Kremlin was relying on the 126th GCDB to defend apparently lots of of sq. miles. “The entrance line is stretched so skinny that some villages on this sector have 15 males defending them,” the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for the Research of Warfare reported.
The coastal-defense brigade didn’t final lengthy. On Oct. 2, there have been stories the 126th GCDB was routed. Two days later, stories claimed the brigade was degraded—if not destroyed.
Russian forces on the best financial institution of the Dnipro east of Kherson, together with no matter stays of the 126th GCDB, seem like falling again to Beryslav, which ought to give them quick access to a sturdy river crossing ought to they should retreat to the left financial institution of the Dnipro and exit the battlefield.
