Vuhledar about to fall; Victory was paid for with rivers of blood... VIDEO

And in doing so, they suffer huge losses. In these actions, the 155th Marine Infantry Brigade of the Russian Navy was destroyed twice, according to Forbes analyst David Axe. They may finally be on the verge of success. A determined attack by the 57th Motorized Brigade of the Russian Army, which began this week, broke through the defenses of the 72nd Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian Army.

Now Russian troops are in the southern part of Vuhledar, and the exhausted Ukrainian garrison may already be retreating north. If the 57th Motorized Brigade takes the ruined remains of Vuhledar in the coming days, it will be a Russian victory, but a very limited one.

Just getting to the suburbs of Vuhledar cost the Russian armed forces about a thousand vehicles and potentially several thousand soldiers. The stubborn defense of Vuhledar by the 72nd Mechanized Brigade - with the help of mines, artillery, anti-tank missiles and drones - destroyed entire Russian brigades.

A series of months-long Russian attacks across the fields outside Vuhledar in late 2022 and early 2023 may have been the most costly for the Russians. At that time, Russian operations in this sector were commanded by two naval units of the Russian Navy of the Pacific Fleet: the 40th and 155th Naval Infantry Brigades.
 

The bloodiest moments of the war

The failed Marine assaults on Vuhledar between November 2022 and February 2023 were among the bloodiest of the war up to that point. The 155th Marine Brigade, which on paper had about 3,000 soldiers, was losing up to 300 soldiers a day for several days in a row and was "nearly destroyed" by February 2023, according to the Warsaw Institute, a Polish think tank.

The Kremlin sent in replacement troops – and ordered the 155th Marine Infantry Brigade back into action. It was soon destroyed again.

"The 155th Brigade has probably been rendered combat ineffective twice in the last six months by engaging in tactically flawed frontal attacks in the vicinity of Wuhledar," the British Ministry of Defense concluded in April 2023.

Perhaps the 40th Marine Brigade fared a little better, but not much. In total, naval brigades and related military units also wrote off about a thousand tanks, combat vehicles, trucks and artillery pieces, according to WarSpotting, a collective that scours social media for evidence of destroyed vehicles in Ukraine.

Huge losses of Russian forces

It is no coincidence that this is about the number of vehicles used by the two brigades - almost six percent of all vehicles that Russia lost in 31 months of fierce fighting in Ukraine. The losses of the Ukrainian forces in and around Vuhledar were significantly lower, as they mostly hid in trenches and bunkers and destroyed the attacking Russians from a distance with the help of mines, artillery, missiles and drones.

On Thursday, September 26, the 40th Marine Brigade moved several miles west along the southern front, leaving direct attacks on the Wuhledar Army. The third iteration of the 155th Marine Infantry Brigade is in the north, in Russia's Kursk Oblast, where it is conducting a counterattack against invading Ukrainian forces.

Whether the capture of the ruins of Vuhledar justified the repeated destruction of one or both of these brigades is a question that only the Kremlin and the survivors of the ill-fated units can answer..