Ukraine's 47th and 100th Brigades Counterattack At Ocheretyne

There is no question that everyone in Ukraine is tired. The news of renewed US military aid has bolstered morale, but much damage has been done. 

A failed replacement maneuver at Ocheretyne, west of Avdiivka, led to a gap in the line, which Russian forces have attempted to exploit. Counterattacking units from the exhausted 47th Brigade, which thought is was heading for a rest - and from the 100th, which is underarmed - are now fighting to close the gap and halt the Russians. JL 

David Axe reports in Forbes:

The 115th Mechanized Brigade was supposed to take the 47th Mechanized Brigade’s place in Ocheretyne, seamlessly filling the same fighting positions with enough troops to maintain the integrity of the defensive line west of Avdiivka. But the 115th Brigade failed to hold the line. So Ukraine ordered the 100th Mechanized Brigade - a former territorial brigade, the equivalent of a U.S. Army National Guard unit - to counterattack. "The Russian advance was stopped by a successful counterattack by the 100th Mechanized Brigade”(and) the withdrawing 47th Mechanized Brigade turned around and rejoined the fight.

This weekend, Russian drones and scouts surveilling the front line just west of the ruins of Avdiivka, in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, observed something strange. Ukrainian trenches just east of the village of Ocheretyne, previously manned by soldiers from the Ukrainian army’s elite 47th Mechanized Brigade, were empty.

The village was undefended.

Seizing the opportunity, the Russian army’s 30th Motor Rifle Brigade raced several miles along the railroad threading west from Avdiivka and captured most of Ocheretyne—and potentially also Novobakhmutivka, the village south of Ocheretyne.

It’s the fastest penetration into Ukrainian territory by Russian forces in months—and it threatens to collapse Ukraine’s defensive line west of Avdiivka. A line that has held for months, but now has a deep and widening gap in it. “Pandora's box is open,” Ukrainian analysis group Deep State commented.

To get a sense of how frightened Ukrainian commanders are right now, consider the brigade they rushed into the breach north and west of Ocheretyne: the 100th Mechanized Brigade. The brigade is one of the newest and most lightly-equipped brigades in the Ukrainian army—and seemingly unsuited for the kind of front-line triage commanders are asking of it.

The collapse in Ocheretyne reportedly isn’t the 47th Mechanized Brigade’s fault. That brigade—the main operator of Ukraine’s American-made armored vehicles—was following orders to withdraw from Ocheretyne in order to redeploy to the rear for a much-needed period of rest after spending nearly a year in combat.

The 115th Mechanized Brigade was supposed to take the 47th Mechanized Brigade’s place in Ocheretyne, seamlessly filling the same fighting positions with enough troops to maintain the integrity of the defensive line west of Avdiivka.

 

But something went wrong. According to Mykola Melnyk, the famed 47th Mechanized Brigade company commander who lost a leg during Ukraine’s counteroffensive last year, “certain units just fucked off.”

The 115th Mechanized Brigade’s failure to hold the line practically invited the Russian 30th Motor Rifle Brigade into Ocheretyne—and triggered a panicky response in Ukrainian headquarters. Commanders ordered the battle-weary 47th Mechanized Brigade to turn around and return to the front line. They also ordered the 100th Mechanized Brigade to counterattack.

 

The 100th Mechanized Brigade is a former territorial brigade—the equivalent of a U.S. Army National Guard unit—that the defense ministry in Kyiv upgraded to the active army in late March.

The 100th Mechanized Brigade isn’t inexperienced: its 2,000 or so troopers have seen action many times in Russia’s 26-month wider war on Ukraine. But the brigade lacks the heavy equipment—Western-made tanks, fighting vehicles and artillery—that gives more elite units such as the 47th Mechanized Brigade much of their combat power.

The 100th Mechanized Brigade fought hard, anyway, intercepting the Russian 30th Motor Rifle Brigade and other units from the Russian 41st Combined Arms Army as they attempted to advance toward the village of Prohres, another seven miles to the west along the same railroad linking Avdiivka to Ocheretyne. “The attempt to advance towards Prohres was stopped by a successful counterattack by the 100th Mechanized Brigade,” Deep State reported.

 

It’s unclear what might happen next in and around Ocheretyne. For now, Ukrainian troops “hold positions in the western part of the village and maintain fire control over its southern part,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies noted.

That the Ukrainians had to rush into a combat a comparatively weak brigade speaks to the paucity of Ukraine’s reserves west of Avdiivka, however. The Russians, for their part, are keeping an entire tank division, the 90th, in reserve around Avdiivka.

If the 90th Tank Division rolls into Ocheretyne before the Ukrainian eastern command mobilizes additional reinforcements, the Russian penetration could widen into a full-fledged breakthrough—one that could force tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops to retreat west to their next line of defenses.

For the Ukrainians, the best reason to be hopeful is the $1 billion in fresh munitions the United States rushed to Ukraine in the hours after the U.S Congress finally, after six months of delay, approved additional U.S. aid to Ukraine on Tuesday.

The Ukrainian brigades around Ocheretyne will need every bullet, shell and missile they can get. Especially the lightly-equipped 100th Mechanized Brigade.

The 47th Mechanized Brigade is one of the Ukrainian army’s best brigades. Equipped with American-made armored vehicles and trained to NATO standards, it fights like the best NATO brigades fight: swiftly, violently and often at night.

But this prowess is a blessing and a curse for the brigade’s 2,000 troopers. The Ukrainian command wants the 47th Mechanized Brigade to be wherever the heaviest fighting is.

So the brigade helped to lead Ukraine’s southern counteroffensive back in June. And when Russian regiments attacked the Ukrainian garrison in the eastern city of Avdiivka in October, the 47th Mechanized Brigade redeployed from the south to the east and reinforced the city—delaying though not preventing the garrison’s eventual retreat.

The 47th Mechanized Brigade has been fighting for nearly a year without a break. Its soldiers are tired; its battalions are running low on their best M-2 Bradley fighting vehicles and M-1 Abrams tanks. The brigade needs a break—and it almost got one this week.

But that planned break was an invitation for the Russian field armies around the ruins of Avdiivka—an opportunity to inflict on the Ukrainians the kind of major defeat the Ukrainians inflicted on the Russians farther north around the city of Kharkiv in late 2022.

As the 47th Mechanized Brigade was pulling back from the front line east of the village of Ocheretyne this weekend, the Russians attacked—and very nearly broke through Ukrainian lines into the 20-mile-wide ribbon of undefended terrain separating the free city of Pokrovsk from the front line.

The Ukrainian army’s 115th Mechanized Brigade was supposed to take the 47th Mechanized Brigade’s place along the front line. But something went wrong. According to Mykola Melnyk, the famed 47th Mechanized Brigade company commander who lost a leg during the summer counteroffensive, “certain units just fucked off.”

Russian scouts and drone operators, surveilling positions once held by the battle-hardened 47th Mechanized Brigade, expected to find fresh troops from the 115th Mechanized Brigade in the same trenches. Instead, they found ... no one.

It was a chance for the Russian army’s 30th Motor Rifle Brigade to roll along a railroad track threading west from Avdiivka and capture a narrow salient that, on a map, looks like a five-mile-long knife stabbing into the Ukrainian line, its sharp point lodged halfway into Ocheretyne.

A Russian breakthrough could have collapsed the entire Ukrainian line west of Avdiivka—and forced tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops and potentially hundreds of thousands of civilians to flee Donetsk Oblast. A Ukrainian breakthrough around Kharkiv in the fall of 2022 resulted in a major rout for the Russian army.

The only reason the Russians didn’t advance deeper into the Ukrainian rear this weekend is that the withdrawing 47th Mechanized Brigade turned around and rejoined the fight. “The 47th Mechanized Brigade is back in business,” Melnyk wrote.

Over the next couple of days, the Russians slightly widened their salient, but didn’t advance any farther to the west. Disaster averted for Ukraine, for now.

But the battle is still raging. If the Russians can move reserves into the salient, they may yet be able to extend their advance. It’s worth noting that the Russian army’s 90th Guards Tank Division is nearby and, at present, uncommitted to battle.

If the division can move west and stiffen the salient, it could—at the very least—complicate any Ukrainian counterattack. In the worst-case scenario for Ukraine, the tank division might be able to force the weary 47th Mechanized Brigade to retreat to the west.

The good news, for the Ukrainian army, is that it’s about to get a lot of ammunition—and, reportedly, a big new consignment of M-2s for the 47th Mechanized Brigade—now that the U.S. Congress is finally poised to approve new U.S. aid to Ukraine following a six-month delay imposed by Russia-aligned Republican lawmakers.

“Russian forces appear to be aiming to make a wide penetration of Ukrainian lines northwest of Avdiivka,” the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C. noted, “but their ability to do so will likely be blunted by the arrival of U.S. and other Western aid.”

The bad news is that whatever went wrong with the 115th Mechanized Brigade appears to be somewhat systemic. It’s the second Ukrainian unit to collapse on the eastern front in just the last few weeks.

The first unit to fail was the 67th Mechanized Brigade, which was defending the most vulnerable district of Ukraine’s most vulnerable city—Chasiv Yar, 20 miles north of Avdiivka—until internal squabbling within the brigade’s command staff, many of them members of a far-right political group, compelled the defense ministry in Kyiv to liquidate the brigade.

The Ukrainian ground forces have just 100 or so combat brigades, and many of them are exhausted from months or years of nonstop fighting—the 47th Mechanized Brigade, for instance.