French-Trained Ukrainian Brigade Self-Destructs Before Even Facing Russians

The official French salute.

As much as I despise Lyndon Baines Johnson and pretty much everyone associated with his administration, I will give credit to Johnson’s Sec. of State, Dean Rusk, just this once.

It was during the 1967 NATO crisis when French President Charles De Gaulle announced he was pulling the plug on NATO, then ordered all US troops out of France.

SIDE NOTE: In spite of Joseph Kennedy, Jr. and John F. Kennedy both being decorated US Navy officers, and Robert F. Kennedy serving honorably, all during WWII, Edward “Teddy” Kennedy was stationed in Paris in the 1950s, where he rose to the rank of… Private First Class.

Anyhow, back to the topic at hand. While the specific quotes vary, the basics are that when De Gaulle ordered all US troops off French soil, Rusk (to his face) asked De Gaulle, words to the effect of, “Does that include US troops IN French soil?”.

All accounts agree that De Gaulle remained silent, then just walked out of the room.

Keep in mind, this is the same nation that fell to the Germans in seven weeks in 1940, even though France had the largest standing army on the planet.

With all that said, I just can’t help but get the impression that the French have implemented the whole Surrender Monkey mindset.

The word on the street is that a French-trained Ukrainian brigade has seen almost one-third of their troops desert rather than take on the Russians in the embattled Donbas region.

As reported by David Axe of Forbes.com (emphasis mine);

A pair of Russian field armies, together overseeing 70,000 troops in dozens of regiments and brigades, is bearing down on Pokrovsk, a fortress city in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast.

Bracing for the coming assault, the culmination of a Russian offensive that began more than a year ago, the Ukrainians are reinforcing Pokrovsk. But one of the reinforcing units, the newly formed 155th Mechanized Brigade—one of the few Ukrainian brigades with German-made Leopard 2 tanks and French-made Caesar howitzers—began disintegrating before it even arrived in the besieged city last week.

The brigade was supposed to have more than 5,800 troops, making it much larger than most of the Ukrainian ground forces’ roughly 100 other combat brigades. But around 1,700 of those 5,800 troops went absent without leave from the brigade at some point during its nine-month work-up in western Ukraine, Poland and France. As recently as November, nearly 500 soldiers were reportedly still AWOL.

“The issue is in organizational and leadership failure,” according to Tatarigami, the founder of the Frontelligence Insight analysis group in Ukraine. Under Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky, military leaders including commander-in-chief Gen. Oleksandr Stanislavovych Syrskyi have prioritized forming new novice brigades—at least 14 of them—over replenishing existing veteran brigades that, after 34 months of hard fighting, might be down to half or less of their original strength.

But the new brigades are dysfunctional—with uneven leadership, missing equipment and entire battalions of undertrained, ambivalently led new recruits who have a bad habit of abandoning their brigade at the first opportunity. Rolling into battle outside Pokrovsk in recent days, the 155th Mechanized Brigade suffered heavy casualties, reportedly even losing some of its tanks and other armored vehicles.