The 22nd Guards GRU Spetsnaz Brigade from the village of Stepnoy in Rostov Oblast is one of the GRU units with the longest service record (Karabakh, Chechnya, Georgia-2008), which from the first days of the invasion stormed Mariupol and Volnovakha and suffered documented losses there – at least 11 killed, according to The Insider's investigation, including one of the brigade's fighters as early as February 27, 2022.
Журавлев Алексей Юрьевич — Гвардии полковник, командир бригады
The 22nd Separate Guards GRU Special Purpose Brigade (military unit 11659) was formed in 1976 in Kapchagay (Kazakh SSR), and has held the Guards title since 2001; it includes the 108th, 173rd, 305th, and 411th separate Spetsnaz detachments. Previously, it was deployed in Nagorno-Karabakh (1990–1991), Chechnya (1994–2000), and the war with Georgia (2008). With the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, the brigade participated in the assault on Mariupol and Volnovakha, then operated in Zaporizhzhia Oblast as part of the "Dnepr" grouping. In mid-March 2022, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported the defeat of one of the brigade's units by fighters of the National Guard "Azov" regiment during the liberation of the outskirts of Mariupol. According to an investigation by The Insider, based on open-source social media data, at least 11 servicemen of the brigade died in Ukraine; the death of sniper Corporal Ilya Sheshokin (February 27, 2022), who had previously carried out missions in Syria and Ukraine as early as 2014, has been identified by name.
Send orders, casualty lists, photos of headquarters or facts of corruption. We guarantee 100% anonymity: the server does not store IP addresses and strips file metadata.