Near the end of Summer 2022, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was likely in a foul mood. His ire would have been directed particularly at the Russian Ministry of Defense and the regular Russian Army.
After failing to deliver a decisive victory in the infamous “three days,” and then being defeated by a vastly outnumbered Ukrainian army at the Battle of Kyiv, the Russian Army regrouped to launch a two-month-long offensive that was supposed to encircle the Ukrainian Army’s best units on the Eastern Front and deliver Donbas in its entirety to Mother Russia. This offensive also failed, and an exhausted and battered Russian army managed to capture Severodonetsk as a face-saving measure.
With Russian manpower depleted and Putin steadfastly refusing to consider mobilization, Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu both needed to address the manpower deficiencies of the Russian Army and deliver some good news to Putin.
The Ministry of Defense began aggressively recruiting volunteers in June-July 2022 with promises of salaries of 200,000 ruble salaries (about $5200/mo or three times the average monthly income of Russians), and 300,000 ruble bonuses.
These measures were necessary due to the severely decreased enthusiasm and volume of volunteers for fighting in Ukraine, owing to whispered reports of high casualties at the front.
The units were gathered and began a 4-week training regime beginning on August 1st. The troops were organized into 40 battalions with a paper strength of just 400 soldiers each. Pre-war Russian Battalions usually had a paper strength of 1000 men, but were often manned with 800 men, thus the 400 soldiers per battalion number represented a significantly undermined unit strength. And yet, the Moscow Times reported that recruiters failed to hit their quotas in many cases, and the 3rd Corps began with units that were even more manpower deficient than its already dire paper strength.
The extremely short training period was already a bad sign: Ukrainian basic training alone is 8 weeks, and Ukrainian Regular Army soldiers receive a minimum of 6 months of training. But the severely undermanned unit strength of the Third Army Corps battalions would potentially force manpower-depleted battalions to defend or attack battalion-sized fronts.
However, Putin and Shoigu demonstrated remarkable optimism about the strength of the Third Army Corps. After all, the Third Army Corps had been given some of the best equipment in the Russian Army.
Russia had maintained in storage some of its most modern equipment like T-90M, T-80BVM, and T-80BV tanks; upgraded Buk SAM batteries, BMP-3 and BMP-2 Infantry Fighting Vehicles, and BTR-80 Armored Personnel Carriers. To equip this new unit, Putin tossed the keys to Shoigu for the finest-looking equipment that was used on parade to display the might of Putin’s Russian Army.
Surely, such a sacrifice by Putin himself would lead to great victories.
T-90M parade unit 2012 Russian Victory Day Parade
But troubling signs that the Third Army Corps would not perform to expectations were already being noted. Ukrainian intelligence reported that recruiters for the Third Army Corps had cut corners to try to meet quotas, and the unit included numerous alcoholics and drug addicts. The Third Army Corps also bent age restriction rules, including older men in what appeared to be their late fifties or possibly even early sixties. Even then, the Third Army Corps appeared to only include perhaps 10,000~12,000 men, when a Russian Army Corps would ordinarily have more like 18,000~20,000 soldiers.
Having completed their short 4-week training program, the Third Army Corps was rushed to bolster what the Russian Ministry of Defense saw as a weakness in their front lines. Photos appearing on social media showed armored vehicles with Third Army Corps markings being transported to the front lines on trains on Aug. 29, likely finishing their deployment by early September.
They were sent to Kharkiv.
The Kharkiv Counteroffensive
Ukraine had long been advertising openly that their counteroffensive would target Kherson, and a long bombardment campaign had been ongoing there. However, a few HIMARS units had been quietly deployed to the Kharkiv Front, and the long-ranged rocket artillery had been systematically degrading Russian defenses in the sector for several weeks.
Ukraine would be gathering its armored forces for a massive blitzkrieg strike in the undermanned sector, but the Russian high command perhaps believed they had addressed the danger by dispatching the Third Army Corps to the front.
The soldiers of the Third Army Corps were now the primary reserve force in the Kharkiv area.
Suddenly, on September 6th, 2022, the Ukrainian Army began its Kharkiv Counteroffensive. Rapidly penetrating Russian defensive lines at Balakliya, the Ukrainian armored spearhead was led by the elite Fourth Tank Brigade and 25th Air Assault Brigade. Bypassing fortified Russian cities to be encircled by follow-up infantry units, the armored spearhead rapidly overran the Russian defensive lines and broke free in Russia's rearward reserve areas.
In theory, the Russian Army still had significant forces it could bring to bear on the Ukrainian breakthrough.
To the northeast was the Russian Third Army Corps, and toward Izium were the rear reserve units of the First Guards Tank Army.
The First Guards Tank Army at least had the excuse of being surprised and taken from the rear. Supporting the advance from Izium towards Sloviansk further south, the units were aligned in the southward direction. Attacked from behind by the UKR Fourth Tank Brigade, the most elite tank formation in the Russian Army was absolutely mauled; the Russian First Guards Tank Army lost 100 tanks in 100 hours.
Forbes suggests that combined with losses suffered at Kyiv, the First Guards Tank Army was nearly annihilated. The First Guards Army has seen little publicly known action since this time. It is known that they received 60-year-old T-62 tanks as replacements for their lost armor.
Remarkably, despite being in a reserve position, the Third Army Corps did worse.
After briefly running into the Ukrainian vanguard and losing a few armored vehicles, the Third Army Corps panicked and simply melted away by joining with the waves of retreating Russian soldiers from other units.
Many Third Army Corps armored simply drove their vehicles until they ran out of gas, then fled on foot. Ukrainian units began to encounter simply abandoned Russian tanks and infantry fighting vehicles in perfect condition with the distinctive circle-within-a-triangle insignia of the Third Army Corps.
What was supposed to be the new and powerful Russian Corps that would defend the North collapsed after mere hours of fighting, and abandoned dozens of armored vehicles for Ukraine to capture.
Kherson and to Avdiivka
Russia did not bother to keep the Third Army Corps together as a single unit. After all, they presumably had no training to operate as a single unit in just 4 weeks of training. This length of training would barely cover squad or platoon-level coordination, let alone thousands of soldiers operating as one body.
Elements of the Third Army Corps were sent to Kherson, Marinka, and Avdiivka as broken-up individual pieces.
Other than the fact they arrived as reinforcements to Kherson, I could not find any information specifically about the Third Army Corps’ performance during the Battle of Kherson, but suffice it to say they were defeated with the rest of the Russian defenders.
One piece of the Third Army Corps that would earn further notoriety would be the unit that was sent to reinforce the Russian push to capture Avdiivka.
After the Third Army Corp’s failures at Kharkiv and Kherson, even the Russian Ministry of Defense could see that sending it forward with valuable equipment but no additional training was a recipe for disaster.
However, Russia was amid a massive mobilization by November 2022, and training officers were in desperately short supply. Trying to re-train the Third Army Corps while also training conscripts and mobiks was an impossibility. Therefore, the Third Army Corps received additional training from the Belarussian Army instead.
The quality of the Belarussian military is… questionable.
When the Third Army Corps’ 10th Tank Regiment was deemed ready to deploy, it was sent to assist in the Russian attempted encirclement of Avdiivka, taking on the task of continuing the encirclement operation from the south.
The 10th Tank regiment proceeded to accomplish nothing and lose perhaps as many as sixty of its seventy tanks. The Third Army Corps tankers simply repeated Russian failed tactics at Vuhledar, sending forward small, uncoordinated squads of 3-4 tanks without infantry or artillery support on all frontal assaults. These would get annihilated by Ukrainian artillery or mines, then the next wave of tanks would be sent forwards.
These attacks continued until the 10th Tank Regiment essentially ran out of tanks by early April 2023.
As of May 24, 2023, Avdiivka remains in Ukrainian hands with no sign of being encircled.
Having been mauled in Avdiivka, the Third Army Corp’s next destination was Bakhmut.
Bakhmut
The 72nd Motorized Rifle Brigade of the Third Army Corps took over defending the positions south of Bakhmut from Wagner mercenaries sometime in early May.
They were facing the Ukrainian Third Assault Brigade, an elite combined arms unit that was formed around a core of soldiers formerly of the Azov Battalion.
This did not go well.
It was a handoff that was reportedly mired in dysfunction and lack of coordination. Wagner soldiers were reportedly ordered not to even talk to the Russian Army troops; two entire Third Corps companies dissolved on contact with the Third Assault Brigade and surrendered or fled. Prigozhin filmed an apoplectic rant decrying the Russian Army soldiers’ lack of courage or any discipline, as the Russians were driven back from their positions near the critical T0504 highway southwest of Bakhmut.
The 72nd Brigade was driven back to near Klishchiivka, undoing all of Wagner’s progress on that front, and threatening to lose the Russian grip on the critical heights southwest of Bakhmut.
The Russian Ministry of Defense is rushing further reserves from the Zaporizhzhia front to Bakhmut to stabilize the situation.
These reinforcements are also elements of the Third Army Corps.
Given what this Corps was given in terms of equipment—essentially the last remaining large quantities of stored T-90Ms, T-80BVMs, and BMP3s—it’s hard to overstate just how disappointing the Third Army Corps’ performance must be to Putin and the Ministry of Defense.
There was stiff competition from the Second Pacific Squadron during the Russo-Japanese War, as Kos pointed out. It’s hard to top a unit that mistook a group of British fishing trawlers in the North Sea as a Japanese torpedo boat ambush and almost accidentally triggering British entry into the war. On its way to being annihilated by the Japanese at Tsushima.
But in terms of sheer incompetence, wasted and precious materiel, and utter lack of any accomplishments of any note, the Third Army Corps will likely rank as among the worst of the worst units in the history of the Russian military.
