Lee Merritt MD: FreedomDoc1

There are no longer any prison recruits or foreign fighters in many Ukrainian line brigades — because they have been transferred to the assault infantry branch.

The "Assault Forces", General Syrski's brainchild, were the right tool to deploy in the situation the AFU was in last year. They are the perfect machine for countering Russian infiltration tactics, which was the doctrinal innovation that carried much of the Russian success in the 2025 summer campaign.

It's more complicated, but the tl;dr is that a bunch of two-man infiltration teams penetrate deep into Ukrainian lines, cross what people call the "kill zone" and start overrunning and killing Ukrainian drone operators, or at least forcing them to retreat -- retreating drone operators means more functional army units can move in, thus, moving the entire frontline and leading to the color changing on the maps.

Syrski's Stormtroopers are the perfect counter to this tactic. The tl;dr on Ukrainian Assault Forces is that they are the fix to one of the biggest Ukrainian problems: quickly redeploying forces.

The Ukrainian army does not have maneuver reserves anymore, and likely won't have any going forward, due to immense manpower problems, and what available manpower there is being funneled into the Assault Forces. Redeploying companies or even platoons from 10 different brigades all across the frontline into one place to reinforce a sector about to collapse takes A LOT of time and is super ineffective -- even worse now with the Ukrainian rail network severely degraded and incapable of transporting serious troop numbers.

The "Assault Forces" fix this. They are the lightest of light infantries. They have nothing. No supply lines, no mechanization, barely any motorization, not even mortars. A non-existent logistics footprint. You stuff 100 guys into two busses and they can get from anywhere to anywhere within a day, max. You throw them into the kill zone to force Russian infiltration teams into infantry combat, which means the Ukrainian drone operators don't flee and don't die, which means the frontline doesn't move.

It works because the "Assault Forces" are much more mobile than our reserves. Obviously, nobody wants to serve in these units because they're a meat assault death machine. You remember the video from near Grishino a couple days ago. All the prison volunteers and many foreign fighters have been shoved into the Assault Forces, too. Alcoholics, junkies, criminals, deserters, press-ganged conscripts. These people are supposed to be consumable items. It's like Wagner's Project K on steroids. It's an inhumane and cruel way to wage war but at the moment it just... works. You just shove 50 losers into a bus and they have "strategically redeployed" within 6 hours. By the time they're dead the next bus has arrived. The "carousel".

It's kind of a short to medium term solution, because the casualties produced by Syrski's Stormtroopers (they even use the leopard as their emblem, which is Syrski's personal call sign (Барс) are unsustainable in the long run, considering how much strain the Ukrainian army is already under with regards to manpower. There are also second-order effects such as stripping personnel from line brigades to feed the meat conveyor belt, which is bad for unit cohesion and other things.

But for now it works, and the Russian military's main task for 2026 is to figure out a way to counter this counter (that's basically what war is: a counter to the counter deployed against your counter to whatever your enemy is doing).

There are several ways to go about this -- I think Russian high command has big plans for the Unmanned Systems Forces, which are currently being greatly reorganized and expanded. Western analysts have started writing about the "Russian Drone Line", a doctrinal concept that is offensive in nature, as opposed to the defensive "Ukrainian Drone Line". We'll talk more about this later.

Russians with Attitude

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