A Ukrainian marine corps T-64 tank fires on Russian troops.
36th Marine Brigade capture
On Oct. 10, Russian marines from the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade overran a team of Ukrainian drone operators in Zelenyi Shlyakh, a tiny hamlet in western Russia’s Kursk Oblast. The Russians stripped the Ukrainians, ordered them to lie face-down on the ground and then shot them, killing all nine.
A week later, Ukrainian marines from the 501st Marine Battalion counterattacked in Zelenyi Shlyakh—and meted out a measure of vengeance. A platoon of marines riding in several M-113 armored personnel carriers, led by a pair of T-64 tanks, thundered along the main north-south road threading past Zelenyi Shlyakh.
The T-64s popped smoke for cover and blazed away with their 125-millimeter guns, scoring a glancing blow on at least one Russian vehicle. A Ukrainian drone spotted five dead Russians. “This is just a small part of the enormous work they do every day!” the battalion wrote about its marines.
The 501st Marine Battalion isn’t the only Ukrainian unit that’s out for revenge in Kursk, which a strong Ukrainian force invaded on Aug. 6, quickly seizing a salient measuring several hundred square miles. Three elite Ukrainian brigades—the 82nd and 95th Air Assault Brigades and the 47th Mechanized Brigade—have also counterattacked the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade.
On Friday, the 95th Air Assault Brigade cornered a Russian marine platoon near Zelenyi Shlyakh and wrecked it with drones, tanks, missiles and mines—reportedly destroying three BTR wheeled armored personnel carriers and killing 30 Russians. “The teleportation of the enemy to Hell took place in a complex way,” the Ukrainian air assault branch boasted.
For the 400-person 501st Marine Battalion, the mission of revenge is also a mission of redemption. The 501st Marine Battalion was part of the Ukrainian garrison in Crimea when Russian troops invaded the strategic peninsula in 2014. As outgunned Ukrainian forces fled the peninsula, just 64 of the 501st Marine Battalion’s personnel joined them. The others—potentially hundreds in all—voluntarily stayed in Crimea, effectively siding with the peninsula’s Russian occupiers.
Eight years later, in the early months of Russia’s wider invasion of Ukraine, the rebuilt battalion joined the garrison in Mariupol on the Black Sea coast. In the early days of the wider war beginning in February 2022, Russian troops laid siege to Mariupol, ruthlessly starving and bombing the city’s garrison as well as its civilian population.
The main garrison—more than 2,000 strong—held out for three months, eventually falling back to the Azovstal steel plant before finally surrendering in late May 2022 when food, ammunition and medicine ran out. The 501st Marine Battalion was not among the final holdouts. Instead, it gave up six weeks earlier during the first week of April.
Decimated in Mariupol, the 501st Marine Battalion had to be rebuilt a second time. Reconstituted with new officers and fresh recruits, the unit rejoined the war in 2023. And in August, it rolled into Kursk—and met a Russian marine unit with a past even more shameful than its own.
Bloodied on three sides by the Ukrainian army, air assault forces and marine corps, the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade is in trouble. Like the Ukrainian 501st Marine Battalion, the Russian brigade has been destroyed and rebuilt multiple times throughout Russia’s 32-month wider war on Ukraine.
It could happen again. The Russian marines who executed those Ukrainian drone operators are “bastards” and “rabid dogs,” the Ukrainian air assault forces stated. For the Ukrainian units counterattacking around Zelenyi Shlyakh, defeating the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade isn’t just a battlefield imperative. It’s personal.