Portrait of Ukrainian Marine Brigade After 1,000 Days at War

Many officers and NCOs from Ukraine’s elite 36th Separate Marine Brigade - named for Rear Admiral Mykhailo Bilinskyi - have been at war for more than a decade not just for 1,000 days. The unit’s combat history is one of the longest and bloodiest in the entire Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU).

Considered Ukraine’s premier amphibious assault formation its baptism of fire occurred in defensive positions to the east of the city of Mariupol in the Donetsk region during Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. They faced bands of Moscow-backed separatists supported by regular Russian army artillery, paratroopers and special forces who were attempting a takeover of the region.

Ukraine was able to call on a limited number of coherent units at the time, so as a stop-gap it threw into the line about 500 men from the 36th Coastal Defense Brigade from Crimea, who were stationed in Mykolaiv at the time.

About half of the formation had gone over to the Russian military when Moscow almost bloodlessly annexed the peninsula. Those that stayed loyal to Ukraine were reflagged as the 36th Marine Infantry Brigade who were thrown into action east of Mariupol, in April 2014. Armed with little more than personal weapons, machine guns and mortars, they nevertheless held the line.

In 2014 and 2015 France, Britain, Russia and Ukraine signed accords called the Minsk agreements which established a theoretical ceasefire supported by international monitors deployed to the region to make sure things stayed quiet. In reality at the front hostilities never really stopped.

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Kyiv’s military headquarters assigned the flatlands east and north-east of Mariupol to its marine brigade. Over the years the members of the 36th rotated into combat rotations where they faced almost continuous periods of lethal artillery and mortar strikes, snipers, and trench raids.

From 2014 until 2021 as the rest of the world considered the war between Russia and Ukraine frozen and largely settled – the 36th Brigade continued to fight and regularly lose men with two or three men killed or wounded nearly every month, and in a bad month more.

Between rotations to the front they recruited, they trained and were slowly re-equipped with heavy weapons. In 2018 they conducted joint training with the US Marines – but who trained who? 

By the early 2020s the 36th Marine Brigade’s officers, NCOs and infantrymen were seasoned veterans long ago used to and no longer much intimidated by the Russian army. Some of the Ukraine’s first strike drone units were formed to support the marines.

Prior to the 2022 war, in contrast with almost every Ukrainian other ground force unit the marines only accepted volunteers, who were subjected to a month-long qualification course which strongly featured mud, little sleep, days and nights of battle drills and angry drill instructors.

When Russia invaded Ukraine a second time, one part of 36th Brigade fought from the defensive positions east of Mariupol it had manned for more than a half-decade. As such in the early days of the war they were able to stop direct attacks by Russia’s 58th Army moving against the city before being forced back to the Azovstal steel mills in Mariupol. They turned this into a fortress and held out for an epic 85 days despite being surrounded by Russian forces. By late May 2022, Moscow’s overwhelming forces had leveled and overrun the city. Almost 1,000 Ukrainian marines were forced to surrender and became prisoners of war.

The other part of the brigade, fought on in the south around the cities of Kherson and Mykolaiv during the summer of 2022 – where its men and women were literally defending their families and homes; Mykolaiv, only a few dozen kilometers to the rear was, and remains the 36th Brigade’s home base.

In October 2022 the Ukrainian army launched its counteroffensive in the south during which the marines were tasked to capture a bridgehead near the village of Davydy Brody, on the Inhulets River.  After a month-long battle, they took it.

In the late spring of 2023, the Brigade was pulled from the line and detailed to become a spearhead unit for an ambitious offensive in the Zaporizhzhia sector, which the Russians had anticipated.

The Ukrainian assault hit prepared Russian defenses and were suffering shortages of promised western ammunition supplies and air defense weapons. The Brigade secured about five kilometers of ground at the cost of almost a quarter of its personnel killed and wounded before, after a month, the generals in Kyiv called the offensive off.

In October 2023 the Ukrainian army high command was desperately looking for new ways to take the war to the Russian army, even though they were heavily outnumbered and even more outgunned. Already sparse western artillery ammunition deliveries were down to a trickle, anti-aircraft ammunition was in even shorter supply, and some of Ukraine’s allies were openly discussing a likely Ukrainian surrender.

In the first major amphibious operation ever conducted by the Ukrainian army, and in the first assault crossing of the Dnipro River since 1943, the 36th Brigade, using small boats, crossed the waterway in three locations near Kherson and carved out a tenuous bridgehead. The terrain was swampy, and Russian artillery pounded the marines - who could only get supplies by boat or drone - for months.

Moscow threw its own marines and paratroopers at the Ukrainians, who held out from the ruined fishing village of Krynky. Glide bombs and heavy shells hammered the bridgehead while the Brigade had little to shoot back with except FPV drones. They reportedly took more than 300 casualties before the last marine evacuated Krynky in April, once again by small boat.

As the Ukrainian high command drew down the Krynky bridgehead the marines saw little respite, because elements of the brigade were mobilized into their old the Donbas sector, to help defend the fortified city of Avdiivka. Russia broke through Ukraine’s defenses in mid-February, but this time the 36th got its sub-units away reasonably intact and, once again, the brigade went into training and replenishment.

Currently combat elements of Ukraine’s 36th Marine Brigade are on the line in Russia’s Kursk region, where they deployed in September. They hold a section in the north-east of the salient and so far, official reports say, their lines are holding.