Thread by @MaxRTucker

I caught up Shaman battalion, an Ukrainian special forces unit, who revealed they had been crossing the Russian border to strike airbases and kill the Kremlin’s senior army commanders.

“We have an increased number of targets, missions on specific people or targets, such as buildings where a general or somebody like that is located inside Russia,” said “Intelligent”, 30, a sergeant involved in planning the missions.

Shaman would not name their targets. But other sources provide clues. In June, Colonel Vladimir Kuznetsov, commander of the 1009th motorised rifle regiment, was ambushed and killed in the Belgorod region while driving a service vehicle alone.

Last month Lieutenant-Colonel Andrei Skuratov of the FSB security service was reported to have been killed when his vehicle hit a mine in the Bryansk region bordering Ukraine.

Shaman troops sometimes escort pro-Ukrainian Russian partisans across the border before breaking off for their missions, a major in Ukrainian military intelligence, GUR, said.

During one such raid in June, paratrooper Colonel Andrey Vasilyevich Stesev, a commander in the Kremlin task force charged with clearing pro-Ukrainian Russian partisans from the Belgorod region, was killed in a firefight. His death was claimed by the partisans.

“Sometimes other groups may claim our kills,” Intelligent noted with a wry smile. The kill teams that work best are six man squads inserted by helicopter, he said, for which GUR has privately purchased a US Black Hawk helicopter and fitted it with a pair of M240 machine-guns.

For other missions the teams have to walk in and back, going through a gruelling 50km training hike with a full pack in order to be eligible to take part. All of them rely on good intelligence and reconnaissance, he stressed.

“You know Russians love money and hate their generals, so we can get a lot of useful information from inside the ranks. And we have a lot of useful kit. The guys will always carry FPV Kamikaze drones, sometimes they can take out even a very strong vehicle.”

Good intelligence, provided by western partners and by human assets in the field, has allowed Shaman to grow far more ambitious than I first met them last year.

‘Shaman’ battalion wreaks havoc in Putin’s backyard

thetimes.co.uk/article/405381…

“Sometimes we think it’s freaky, it’s too big for us, but we still do it. Including airbases with serious guarding. So it can’t be only a team. There need to be people in the city, our sources, or in the base, in the Russian military. All of that can make it work.”

In December, explosions rocked the Engels-2 and Dyagilevo airbases, home to the Tupolev Tu-22 and Tu-95 strategic bombers used to strike Ukraine. Engels-2 is in Saratov, 450 miles east of Ukraine, and Dyagilevo is barely 150 miles from Moscow.

Shaman’s activities provide a possible explanation for some of these attacks. But things do not always go their way. “I don’t remember how many funerals I went to this year. No one is Iron Man, you know, it’s just regular guys.”

As an operations planner, the deaths of his brothers carry a particular burden. “Everybody who is involved in planning missions sits around afterwards and asks, ‘could we do something different, could we have done something else, would he be alive if we did?’”

On May 8 last year Shaman teams, backed by SBU Alpha Group troops rappelled from eight helicopters onto Snake Island, tasked with capturing it from the Russians after a series of Ukrainian strikes on the garrison and the ships supplying them.

“There was an epic battle with about 100 Russian marines, supported by some special operations special forces,” the GUR major said. Both Shaman and Alpha suffered two killed each, with one helicopter shot down, before deciding to withdraw. The Shaman commander was wounded.

Shaman was a small special operations outfit before the war began, but its reputation for heroics from Hostomel airport to Snake Island has attracted hundreds of eager recruits wanting to join, swelling it to battalion size.

That has meant taking on some less glamorous tasks, however. For three months they served in the trenches at Bakhmut, ordered to preserve the “road of life” supplying Ukrainian forces inside the city during the Russian siege.

The battles in the trenches were a bloody mess best forgotten, the major said. One soldier, Gizo, was sent at dawn to lead a team to retake positions from Russians who had been pounded with artillery fire.

“The sun’s rising and you’re looking at a scene from a horror movie — parts of weapons, parts of bodies, too many bodies of the enemy. You’re moving along the trench, looking for any movement. But there are so many weapons, so many rifles, it’s hard to tell who is active,”

Gizo noticed a rifle barrel trembling and fired a full magazine into it. A return bullet caught him in the forehead. “But he had a GoPro camera strapped to his helmet, the bullet separated into two, entering his face and not his brain. It’s crazy, he survived.

Intelligent was a lawyer before he joined Shaman the month after the Russian invasion, but said he had discovered more meaning in the trenches of Bakhmut. “Personally I don’t consider myself a hero but the guys who I’m serving with, they are living heroes…

I saw a situation where one of our guys got wounded and asked for help, but you absolutely couldn’t go there because it was totally in the open and Russian snipers were working on that plateau. Our guys went to get him anyway.

“It comes from our commander that you know you should do everything to save your brother. Yes, sometimes we have examples where that costs another life. But we have a higher principle, a higher purpose.”

Read the full dispatch here:

How Kyiv’s kill squads pick off commanders inside Russia

thetimes.co.uk/article/8921f1…