New NATO-trained Ukrainian brigade disbanded after mass defections

The newly created and NATO-trained Ukrainian Anna of Kiev brigade has been forced to disband after suffering mass defections. Up to 1,700 of the brigade's 4,500 soldiers are said to have deserted.

It is at the beginning of last year that the grand plan is drawn up: The creation of fourteen completely new Ukrainian brigades to force the Russians out of Ukraine.

Ukraine will provide the crew. NATO countries for training and armament. Weapons and equipment for each new brigade is estimated to cost the equivalent of around ten billion Swedish kronor.

Creating new brigades instead of reinforcing existing ones is considered a better solution. In this way, the new units can relieve the old, often very war-weary troops at the front.

Anna of the Kiev Brigade
In March of last year, work began on the first such brigade: the Anna of Kiev Brigade, named after France's Kiev-born queen in the mid-11th century.

In June, the recruitment work begins, but already at the end of the summer, the project runs into problems. 2,550 men, more than half of the soldiers recruited for Anna by the Kiev brigade, are instead sent to the front where they are desperately needed to reinforce existing units. Something that the Ukrainian journalist Yuri Butusov writes about on Facebook.

It is then France that takes the lead for the training of the new brigade, and parts of the soldiers who will be part of the new brigade are sent to that country for training.

In October, training has begun at an army base in the Grand Est region near the border with Germany. Macron himself is there, shaking hands with the Ukrainian soldiers and posting pictures and videos from the meeting on social media.

The French military is donating some of its most state-of-the-art equipment to the newly created brigade. 128 troop transport vehicles, 18 anti-tank gun trucks and an equal number of self-propelled howitzers. In addition, anti-aircraft robots, trucks, and vehicles for medical evacuation.

Mass desertions and dissolution
But the problems with the newly created brigade continue in France. The majority of the almost 2,000 soldiers being trained at the French army base have no or very little previous military experience. Just over 1,400 are basically completely green newly enrolled recruits. And about 50 of those sent to France for training simply deviate from the base. They desert.

The situation in Ukraine is even worse. Those recruited into the new French-trained brigade are dropping out on a large scale. 700 immediately after being placed in it. According to the French newspaper Le Figaro and the AFP news agency, which spoke to Ukrainian investigators, in the end nearly 1,700 of the brigade's 4,500 soldiers deserted. About four out of ten men.

After the training, what remains of the brigade is sent to Pokrovsk, where some of the fiercest fighting rages. There, the brigade, which is not equipped with either drones or equipment for electronic interference warfare, suffers "significant losses".

According to the British The Telegraph, which also draws attention to the NATO-trained brigade, the Ukrainian commanders choose to finally disband it. Instead, the soldiers and equipment are spread out among existing brigades already participating in the fighting at Pokrovsk.

Critics now argue that the creation of new Ukrainian NATO-trained brigades is nothing more than an "idiotic" PR project doomed to failure. And that it would have been much better if the new weapons had been given to existing combat-experienced units instead of new and inexperienced ones.