- Ukraine has “completely defeated” the Russian 810th Naval Infantry Brigade, Ukraine’s spy chief claimed.
- Is the second time Ukrainian forces have destroyed the brigade, rendering them combat-ineffective.
- The Russian military has suffered “extreme attrition and high turnover,” the UK MoD said on Saturday.
Ukraine’s spy chief, Kyrylo Budanov, said that the Russian 810th Naval Infantry Brigade had withdrawn after being defeated amid Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
“That brigade was completely defeated, completely smashed, and now they have withdrawn, being replaced by airborne troops,” Budanov said in an interview with The War Zone.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington DC-based think tank, said that Budanov’s description corresponds to the US military’s definition of a mission to “destroy,” which means to render an enemy force “combat-ineffective until it is reconstituted.”
The brigade, which is based in Sevastopol, Crimea, was destroyed by Ukraine once before in April 2022, when the Ukrainian army reported that 158 soldiers had been killed and about 500 wounded, the think tank noted.
The losses included their commander, Colonel Aleksey Sharov, Russian media reported at the time.
The Deputy Chief of Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence service, Major General Vadym Skibitskyi, claimed in July 2022 that about 200 marines of the 810th Brigade had refused to return to war.
Two months later, the Ukrainian army reported that the brigade had lost more than 85% of its personnel fighting in the Kherson region, and that many again had refused to return to combat, per the ISW’s updates.
The 810th Brigade had since been reconstituted by the Russian military, and the ISW observed elements of it in the Zaporizhia region this year. A full-strength Russian brigade has at least 2,000 soldiers.
The heavy losses suffered by this brigade are emblematic of the wider issues faced by the Russian military, which has been suffering from “extreme attrition and high turnover,” the UK Ministry of Defense said on Saturday.
While Russia has suffered a high number of casualties during the conflict, according to Western estimates, it also has a large population from which to continue to recruit and conscript soldiers.
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