A 1st Presidential Brigade trooper near Bakhmut.
Ukrainian defense ministry photoOfficially, it’s the mission of the Ukrainian national guard’s 1st Presidential Brigade to defend the leader of Ukraine. In peacetime, that might mean manning guardposts in Kyiv and escorting the president on his travels.
But Ukraine isn’t at peace—and hasn’t been since 2014, when Russian troops first seized Ukraine’s strategic Crimean Peninsula then invaded eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. So the 1st Presidential Brigade’s remit has, uh, somewhat expanded.
Now in addition to protecting Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky and his family, the elite brigade, thousands strong and nicknamed for 17th-century Ukrainian military hero Bohdan Khmelnytsky, guards strategic facilities in Kyiv such as power plants. And it also fights on the front.
And not just any sector of the front. Arguably the hardest sector: the fields and forests around Bakhmut, a town with a pre-war population of around 70,000, 30 miles north of Donetsk, the seat of the separatist “Donetsk People’s Republic” in Donbas.
As Ukrainian forces press their advantage, three months after launching twin counteroffensives in the east and south, Bakhmut is one of the few places where the Russians and their separatist and mercenary allies still are trying to attack.
The battle for Bakhmut, which pits Russian regulars, DPR separatists and mercenaries from The Wagner Group against the Ukrainian forces holding the town—including the 1st Presidential Brigade—might be the most absurd of these isolated Russian offensive operations. Which of course is little comfort to the 1st Presidential Brigade troopers hunkering in cold, muddy trenches around the town.
Bakhmut itself doesn’t have a lot of military value. Certainly not any value that’s worth the lives of the few good troops the Kremlin has left after nine months of grinding warfare and repeated botched efforts to raise new forces.
According to the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C., The Wagner Group views the Bakhmut battle as an opportunity to score public-relations points by proving the mercenaries can win ... while the rest of the Kremlin’s forces lose.
But the Ukrainian military is determined to deprive the Russians of any victory in Bakhmut, even a P.R. one. It’s not for no reason that the 1st Presidential Brigade has sent at least one of its battalions and the battalion’s BTR-4 wheeled armored vehicles to the town to fight alongside forces including the 93rd Mechanized Brigade—itself one of the Ukrainian army’s better brigades.
One video, recorded by a 1st Presidential Brigade trooper, speaks to the intensity of the fighting. He and some comrades man an M-2 heavy machine gun in a trench in a forest outside Bakhmut as Russian snipers take aim at them from three directions. “Get out of my forest!” one trooper shouts as he returns fire with his AK-style assault rifle.
Other videos that recently have circulated online depict Ukrainian drones dropping improvised bombs on Russian troops cowering in shallow dugouts outside Bakhmut—and killing seemingly scores of them.
In weeks of failed attacks on Bakhmut, the Russians have lost potentially hundreds of men killed and wounded—and the 1st Presidential Brigade and other Ukrainian units still control the town.
The Ukrainian president’s personal brigade might be a long way from Kyiv and the president. But it’s fighting, and so far winning, a battle that might prove pivotal to the wider war—and Zelensky’s future—as Russia spends its last good forces for no real gain.
