A Ukrainian Brigade Disappeared, And A Russian Brigade Almost Broke Through: How The Battle For Ocheretyne Upended The War In Ukraine This Weekend

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.

Kyiv can’t afford to lose two whole brigades right now—and can’t afford to keep overexerting its best brigades. Billions of dollars of fresh weapons are on their way, but those weapons are useless if there aren’t enough deployed, orderly and well-rested units to use them.