The 76th Guards Air Assault Division in training before the Ukraine war.
Russian defense ministry photoThe Kremlin is rushing reinforcements to southern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Oblast. It’s a desperate bid to prevent a major Ukrainian breakthrough along a critical axis.
The reinforcements are from the 76th Guards Air Assault Division, which is “arguably Russia’s best division and is relatively fresh,” according to Rob Lee, an analyst with the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. The division most recently went on the attack early this year around Kreminna, where the Russians still are sustaining a limited offensive.
That the Russians are redeploying the 76th GAAD speaks to the growing momentum of the Ukrainians’ 2023 counteroffensive, which kicked off with simultaneous armored assaults along several axes in southern and eastern Ukraine.
In just the last couple of weeks, the Ukrainian army and independent air-assault force have liberated Robotyne in Zaporizhzhia, while the Ukrainian marine corps has ejected Russian troops from Urozhaine, 60 miles east of Robotyne in the Mokri Yaly River Valley.
The twin Ukrainian victories bring Kyiv’s forces a few miles closer to their two main objectives in southern Ukraine. The Ukrainians aim to free the cities of Melitopol and Mariupol from their Russian occupiers. The Russians aim to maintain their hold on the cities in order to safeguard overland supply routes into Russian-occupied Crimea.
The outcome could come down to which side makes best use of its reserves. To achieve its breakthrough around Robotyne, the Ukrainian southern command deployed one of its few in-reserve formations: the 82nd Air Assault Brigade. Now the Kremlin is deploying one of its own few reserve formations.
A Ukrainian reserve officer who tweets under the handle @Tatarigami_UA was one of the first to note the 76th GAAD’s redeployment from the Kreminna sector in northeastern Ukraine to the Robotyne-Tokmak-Melitopol axis.
“According to Russian military doctrine, at least on paper, 76th Division is a part of their strategic reserves, underscoring the seriousness of the move,” @Tatarigami_UA wrote on Saturday.
The reason the officer stressed that the 76th GAAD is a reserve unit on paper is that the division, which oversees three infantry regiments each with a couple of thousand troops, has been on the front line for much of Russia’s 19-month wider war on Ukraine.
The division fought around Kyiv in the wider war’s early weeks and reportedly participated in the massacre of Ukrainian civilians in Bucha in the spring of 2022. After retreating from north-central Ukraine, the division redeployed to the east with its T-90 and T-72 tanks and BMP-2 and BMD fighting vehicles.
Six months later in August 2022, the 76th GAAD temporarily shifted battalions to southern Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast in a frantic effort to halt Ukraine’s 2022 counteroffensive.
The 76th GAAD couldn’t prevent the Ukrainians from liberating much of southern Ukraine north of the Dnipro River last fall. But it did make the Ukrainians pay for every mile they advanced. In late October, 76th Division gunners devastated a column from the Ukrainian 35th Marine Brigade outside Kostromka, 20 miles north of the Dnipro.
In committing the 76th GAAD to halt a Ukrainian attack in southern Ukraine, for the second time in a year, the Kremlin is going all in. “On one hand, this strengthens Russian operational capacities,” @Tatarigami_UA wrote. “On the other, their failure will critically impair … combat-ready reserves for rapid deployment.”
Any future effort to reinforce Russian defenses in one sector could come at the expense of Russian defenses in another sector, according to the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C. “A lack of sizeable operational reserves would force the Russian command to conduct further lateral redeployments and make decisions about what sectors of the front to prioritize.”
The implication is obvious. If the Ukrainians can maintain their momentum in the south, they might force the Russians to make a hard choice: to hold in the south or hold in the east. They probably wouldn’t be able to do both.
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