David Axe
Three weeks ago, the Ukrainian army’s northeastern counteroffensive dismantled one of the Russian army’s elite units: the 1st Guards Tank Army.
Now the same counteroffensive reportedly has wrecked a new motorized infantry division the Kremlin stood up a few years ago in order to help protect the 1st GTA. After suffering steep losses around Bakhmut in recent days, it’s possible the 144th Guards Motor Rifle Division no longer is combat-effective.
These losses are unsustainable for the Russian army—and explain why the Kremlin is willing to risk widespread unrest as it forcibly drafts 300,000 men and speeds them to the Ukrainian front line with as little as a day of training. The professional Russian army is disintegrating.
The Russian army formed the 144th Guards Motor Rifle Division and a companion division specifically for war in Ukraine. Together, the two divisions make up the 20th Combined Arms Army. On paper, the 20th CAA oversees more than 20,000 troops riding in 560 BMP fighting vehicles and 300 T-72 tanks.
The army optimized the 144th GMRD and the rest of the 20th CAA for the semi-open spaces of northeastern Ukraine and based them in southern Russia near the Ukrainian border. The 144th GMRD originally operated out of a base in Yelnya, 150 miles from the border and another 150 miles from Kyiv.
According to the CNA think-tank in Washington, D.C., the plan was for the 144th GMRD and its sister division to roll into Ukraine alongside the 1st GTA and protect the tank army’s left flank in a hypothetical assault on Kyiv.
That hypothetical assault became a real assault in late February when the 1st GTA and its supporting divisions, including the 144th GMRD, attacked toward Kyiv. A month later the Russians—their supply lines fraying, several of their generals dead—retreated back across the Russian and Belarusian borders.
The 144th GMRD suffered badly in the Kyiv campaign, but with time and reinforcements it managed to return to the fight—in the northeast. Units of the 144th GMRD reportedly manned the Russian army’s secondary defensive line along the Oskil River in northeastern Ukraine. When a dozen eager Ukrainian brigades punched through Russians’ outermost defenses just east of Kharkiv, the vanguard units—including the 1st GTA—fled east across the Oskil.
The 1st GTA all but imploded in those heady first days of the Ukrainian counteroffensive starting the first week of September. The tank army lost at least half of its 200 T-80 tanks. The survivors forded the Oskil, hoping the river—and the 144th GMRD and other units defending its banks—would stop the Ukrainians.
They didn’t. The Ukrainian army crossed the river in at least five places and kept pushing east. The 144th GMRD’s regiments “are going to immortality,” one Russian mouthpiece lamented.
At least one company from the 144th GMRD reportedly took part in a doomed countercounteroffensive outside Bakhmut, 20 miles south of the Russians’ logistical hub in Lyman, which currently is the locus of the Ukrainian operation. The Ukrainian garrison in Bakhmut has held. That company from the 144th GMRD ceased to exist.
It took years for the Russian army to form the 144th GMRD—and just a few months for the Ukrainian army to erase it. The division is just one of several units the Russians might try to reconstitute with aging, unwell, unhappy draftees and very old tanks and fighting vehicles.
If the Russians succeed in restoring the 144th GMRD, the Ukrainians might get to destroy it again.
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