Ukraine’s 93rd Mechanized Brigade Just Liberated A Village From The Russians

Lately you’ve had to look really hard to find unambiguous good news for either of the armies fighting in Ukraine.

The battered Russian army, still a hundred battalions strong but increasingly fragile, is struggling to stiffen its defenses in southern Ukraine while also seizing a single tiny village on the outskirts of separatist-controlled Donetsk in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.

The Ukrainian army meanwhile is trying to put weight behind a slow counteroffensive in the south while also exploiting gaps in Russian defenses in the east—but without the massive reinforcements commanders say these counterattacks usually require.

If there’s an exception to this ambivalent state of affairs, it might be the Ukrainian 93rd Mechanized Brigade. It’s one of the few Ukrainian formations that actively is liberating Russian-occupied settlements.

The 93rd reportedly led the assault that pushed Russian troops out of the village of Mazanivka southwest of Izium in Donbas last week. Videos that circulated online depict Ukrainian troops rolling past ruined buildings and wrecked Russian vehicles.

The brigade, which has been fighting in northeastern and eastern Ukraine since Russia attacked in late February, is taking advantage of Russia’s response to Ukraine’s slow—but escalating—counteroffensive aimed at liberating the Russian-occupied port of Kherson on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast.

To blunt the Ukrainian attacks, the Kremlin is shifting to the south around a third of the 5o or so battalions it had concentrated in the east earlier this summer. The battalions that are left in Donbas are too few and too weak to hold every settlement they’ve captured since February.

The 93rd is seizing the initiative. And it’s not the first time it’s done so. Back in late March, the 93rd led one of the first major counterattacks around Kharkiv, the most vulnerable of Ukraine’s major cities.

Situated as it is just 25 miles from the Russian border, Kharkiv was one of the invaders’ first objectives. But the city’s garrison held on. And in late March, Ukrainian forces including the 93rd pushed back, ultimately creating a 20-mile buffer zone around the city that has held ‘til now.

In the process, the 93rd met the Russian 4th Guards Tank Division in the town of Trostianets, 50 miles north of Kharkiv. The 93rd’s troopers in their BMP and BTR fighting vehicles, packing Javelin anti-tank missiles and supported by T-80 tanks and off-the-shelf drones, mauled the Russian division.

Reporters counted dozens of destroyed Russian vehicles. “It’s beautiful,” a local policeman said. “All this scrap metal.”

The 93rd shifted farther south and kept fighting. The 93rd has fired so many of the American-made Javelin anti-tank missiles that officers have struggled to dispose of the missiles’ spent tubes.

The brigade like most Ukrainian formations is using a lot of ex-Russian hardware it captured, including a rare Nona-SVK 120-millimeter mortar on the chassis of a BTR-80 armored personnel carrier. “This vehicle had a jammed engine and lacked some spare parts,” the commander of the 93rd’s maintenance battalion said soon after the brigade recovered the mortar. “However, soon she will be fighting against her former owners.”

Just how far the 93rd can push back the Russians around Izium depends on a lot of factors, including ammunition supplies and morale. But the most important variable might be the Russians themselves. The Kremlin keeps shifting forces between the eastern and southern fronts in order to block Ukrainian advances.

If the 93rd gains much more ground, the Russians might wake up to the threat the brigade poses—and send in reinforcements to stiffen local defenses.

That of course could deprive some other commander of the forces he needs to hold his own lines. Which, in short, is the dynamic underpinning the whole current phase of this five-month-old war.