"Thrown in a meat grinder."The elite brigade of the GRU suffered serious losses during the retreat from Liman
- Ilya Barabanov, Olga Ivshina
- BBC
October 4, 2022
The BBC has learned that elite Russian military formations took part in the unsuccessful defense of Liman, and they suffered serious losses.The 3rd Guards Special Forces Brigade of the Main Directorate of the General Staff lost at least nine people dead and one seriously wounded during the retreat from Liman, the BBC found out by studying social networks and talking with the sister of one of the dead soldiers. Such military formations have been sent to the most important military missions since Soviet times. While the Russian army was retreating from this city in the Donetsk region, Russian propaganda told that it was defended by mobilized from the self-proclaimed LPR and Russian volunteers from the Bars units, which are formed in the regions.
"The entire third special brigade was killed by the special forces. They threw it into a meat grinder. What a handsome man I have. 19 years old."
"When performing tasks on the territory of Ukraine, my brother died heroically. Eternal memory to you, my heart, my hero!"
"They told me very sad news for me! My brothers, friends, true comrades in the service and just good men died. I will miss you!"
"We ask for prayers for the repose of the warrior Vyacheslav (Zintsov), a graduate of the boarding school at the Nikolo-Shartomsky Monastery. He died in Krasny Liman."
On September 30 and October 1, a number of messages appeared on the VKontakte social network, which indicated that the retreat of the Russian army from the city of Liman in the Donetsk region was not as easy as the official Russian media reported, and not only volunteers tried to defend the city from Russia or mobilized residents of the self-proclaimed republics that Vladimir Putin had declared by that time to be Russian territory.
"8 people died, two were injured in serious condition. One of them died, one is still alive, but very heavy. The whole group almost died. The guys are real heroes. It's a pity that there are no more of these heroes," the BBC said. si sister of one of the dead servicemen, confirming that during the retreat from Liman, the detachment was lost by the 3rd special forces brigade of the General Staff from Tolyatti. "A total of nine people died, two were injured," said the wife of another victim.
Their relatives do not have full information about the place and circumstances of the death of the paratroopers, the information they receive is fragmentary: “I know that these guys were abandoned there, they fought back for a whole day, but could not. My brother died, he was only 21 years old, he died friend, he is 19 years old,” said the sister of the deceased. When the bodies of the servicemen will be returned home and when the funeral will take place, the families do not yet know.
19-year-old private Danil Boikov was the youngest in this department; senior lieutenant Vyacheslav Zintsov, junior lieutenant Viktor Gorobets, foremen Andrey Shorin and Yuri Filatov, and private Aleksey Chindin were killed with him. Servicemen Karpenko and Uzbyakov were taken to the hospital with severe wounds. Uzbyakov later died.
This is probably the largest one-time loss of the 3rd Special Purpose Brigade, although it suffered losses from the very beginning of the war: “Of course, [losses] were, but does anyone tell us about this,” said the sister of one of the victims.
As far as we know from open sources, the first fighters of the 3rd GRU brigade died in early March. Before the retreat from Liman, the most difficult day for the brigade was the day from March 3 to March 4 - then four scouts were killed: company commander Major Azamat Alimov, captain Alexei Chuchmanov, junior sergeant Stanislav Gerasimov and junior sergeant Yegor Bukatin.
BBC journalists, "Mediazona" (recognized in Russia as a "foreign agent") and a group of volunteers from the first day of the war have been counting the dead Russian servicemen based on open sources. By September 1, journalists had
collected dataon 26 dead servicemen of the 3rd Guards Special Forces Brigade, among whom were five officers; by mid-September, an unusual but important source of information was a stand with photographs of the dead military, exhibited during the boxing championship of the Russian Armed Forces in Borisoglebsk . It was printed with the data of 47 dead soldiers and officers of the 3rd Guards Brigade of the GRU special forces.
After reviewing the photos on the stand, the BBC found out that the names of most of the commandos mentioned had previously appeared in the media and social networks, but without specifying the place of service. The stand also featured photographs of two Grushnikovs whose deaths had not been publicly reported before. Now at least nine new names have been added to this list.
And then, and now, almost every fourth soldier of the GRU special forces who died is an officer. Such losses are especially sensitive for the army and difficult to replace. A special forces officer can only be replaced by a person with the same specialty and level of training, and this takes years of training and training.
According to Michael Kofman, an expert at the American Center for Naval Analysis, for every Russian soldier who died during the war in Ukraine, an average of about three and a half were wounded. On the basis of these data, it can be assumed that more than 200 people could have left the ranks of the 3rd GRU special forces brigade as a result of death or injury (at least temporarily).
The exact number of special forces units is classified. But even according to conservative estimates, the elimination of more than 200 fighters can be equivalent to the complete failure of two special forces companies. During the war in Chechnya, the reconnaissance companies of the GRU spetsnaz consisted of 45-70 people. If we take such an assessment as a basis, it is possible that 75% of the reconnaissance companies of the brigade were put out of action.
What is the 3rd brigade of the Main Directorate of General Staff
The 3rd GRU brigade, now commanded by Colonel Albert Omarov, was created in 1966 in the GDR. From January 1991 to June 1992, she was deployed in Riga, and then was relocated to the village of Roshchinsky, Samara Region. In 2010, the brigade moved to Tolyatti. The brigade's servicemen took part in the civil war in Tajikistan, two Chechen campaigns, a peacekeeping mission in Kosovo, and in the early 2000s they guarded Russian missions in Kabul, Afghanistan. In August 2017, the brigade lost two of its members in Syria.
The year 2015 turned out to be scandalous for the 3rd GRU brigade, when two Russian citizens Yevgeny Erofeev and Alexander Alexandrov were captured near the town of Shchastya in the Luhansk region. During interrogation, they stated that they were servicemen of the 3rd Guards Brigade. The Russian side, which at that time denied the presence of its troops in eastern Ukraine, said that these servicemen had long since retired and fought on the side of the "LPR people's militia" as volunteers.
In April 2016, Erofeev and Aleksandrov were sentenced in Ukraine to 14 years in prison, and a month later they were exchanged for the Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda Savchenko, whom the Russian side accused of being involved in the death of the film crew of the All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company. Nothing was reported about the further fate of Erofeev and Aleksandrov, and Savchenko then managed to visit the deputy of the Verkhovna Rada, a defendant in a criminal case and a journalist.
Between the Cossacks and the mobilized
The Russian media almost never report on operations involving the special forces of the General Staff, sometimes this becomes known after the fact if the operation is successful, and in the case of the war in Ukraine and if we are talking about retreats of the Russian army, propaganda always tries to present the case in such a way that on a specific sector of the front, it was not regular military men who failed, but Russian volunteers and those mobilized from the self-proclaimed republics.
This is how it happened when the Armed Forces of Ukraine broke through the front in the Kharkiv region, eventually freeing Balakleya, Izyum, Kupyansk and many other settlements. Then the Russian media said that the front line was held there by mobilized from the LNR and fighters of the Russian Guard from Bashkortostan and Samara. Only a few days later
it turned out that marines from the Kaliningrad region were captured there.
Kuvan tekstien Google Lens -käännös, kiitos käyttäjälle "Sanavalmis Muurinen":
Official Russian military correspondents spoke about the defenders of Liman in similar intonations: “It is immediately clear from them that these are ordinary war workers, on whom the fronts have been held up throughout our history. No show-offs, excesses in equipment, bravado,” wrote Alexander Kots from Komsomolskaya Pravda, specifying that these are volunteers from the Bars-13 detachment, Cossacks, mobilized residents of the self-proclaimed LPR and the 20th Army.
The telegram channel Rybar, which specializes in military subjects, specified the composition of Liman’s defenders: “503rd Guards Motorized Rifle Regiment from the 19th Motorized Rifle Division of the 58th Combined Arms Army.” In the pro-Russian channel "Older Edda" they wrote: "The Liman is defended not only by the Kuban BARS, but also by the regular army."
And the former journalist of the Russian pro-Kremlin channel Lifenews and the author of the Wargonzo project, Semyon Pegov, told those gathered on Red Square in honor of the annexation of the occupied territories of Ukraine that Liman was defended by "Smolensk infantry, Barsy" - volunteers, "Russian Legion", commandants who do not leave the city" .
From the obituaries that have appeared in recent days and conversations with relatives of the victims, it became clear that, in addition to those mobilized from the self-proclaimed republics and volunteers, the GRU special forces also tried (unsuccessfully) to hold Liman.
In the USSR, the GRU special forces were used to carry out the most important secret operations and sabotage behind enemy lines.
In Russia, GRU detachments began to be entrusted with other - unusual for them - tasks, since many other army units were not prepared to participate in battles. In the early years of the war in Chechnya, the GRU special forces were often used simply as combined arms intelligence. And during the assault on Grozny, special forces detachments were generally included in the assault groups on a common basis.
Experts interviewed by the BBC note that during the war on the territory of Ukraine, GRU detachments are again used to solve tasks unusual for elite intelligence officers (including defensive battles), and this leads to additional losses.
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