Robotyne, a town in southern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Oblast, marks the farthest advance of Ukrainian forces in their summer 2023 offensive. As summer turned to fall last year, the weary Ukrainians dug in—and braced for the inevitable Russian counterattack.
When the Russians finally came, in October, the very same exhausted Ukrainian brigades that had liberated Robotyne now had to defend it. Nearly six months later, those same brigades still are there—and only recently have begun to receive some reinforcements in the form of the 141st Infantry Brigade, one of Ukraine’s newest combat formations.
We know very little about the 141st Brigade. It apparently formed right as the Ukrainian offensive kicked off in early June 2023. The brigade reportedly combines six rifle battalions, each with probably a few hundred troops.
The brigade apparently spent the summer and fall in training. The first evidence the 141st had deployed for combat came on Saturday, when the unit posted a video depicting a strike on Russian infantry by one of its first-person-view drones.
The 141st arrives in Robotyne at a critical time. The Ukrainian garrison in and around the ruined town has been beating back nearly daily Russian assaults, but it’s doing so with tired troops and equipment—and with one fewer brigade after chopping the 47th Mechanized Brigade to the Ukrainian eastern command for the fight in—and now outside of—Avdiivka.
Losing the 47th Brigade left the army’s 65th Mechanized Brigade and the air-assault force’s 82nd Brigade in charge of Robotyne. Both brigades have been in combat non-stop for nine months. And as the spring settles in and the ground softens, the 82nd Brigade’s sole tank company is struggling to keep its under-powered, 71-ton Challenger 2 tanks un-stuck.
In reinforcing Robotyne, the 141st Brigade apparently isn’t bringing fresh tanks, however. It seems the brigade lacks the supporting forces—artillery gunners, engineers and, yes, tankers—that make a brigade a “mechanized” unit.
No, the 141st first and foremost is an infantry formation. That it may lack heavy equipment is a reminder that, after suffering heavy losses in last summer’s offensive, the Ukrainian military is struggling evenly to equip all of its brigades with tanks, fighting vehicles and artillery.
Tanks, fighting vehicles and artillery aren’t actually Kyiv’s most urgent needs, however. No, it needs infantry. “The basis of everything is the lack of people,” one battalion commander told The Washington Post last month. That’s a need the new 141st Brigade partially can meet.
But it’s only one brigade in a military that should have a hundred of them. Ukraine’s manpower shortage likely amounts to dozens of brigades. The 141st is part of a grouping of just three new infantry brigades that formed starting last summer. Kyiv around the same time also formed five seemingly under-strength mechanized brigades.
So while the 141st and other new brigades might shore up Ukrainian defenses in a few sectors, they are too few fully to replace the tired and depleted brigades that fought in the 2023 offensive. No, those units must remain on the front line until the politicians in Kyiv finally pass a new law that could mobilize hundreds of thousands of fresh troops.