First Chechen War The 205th Separate Motor Rifle Brigade was formed by 1 May 1995 (although it marks its anniversary on 2 May) in accordance with a 17 March Minister of Defense directive during the
First Chechen War. The brigade was formed in recently captured
Grozny from battalions and companies drawn from the 167th Separate Motor Rifle Brigade, deployed from
Chebarkul, the
131st Separate Motor Rifle Brigade from
Maykop, and the 723rd Guards Motor Rifle Regiment of the
16th Guards Tank Division from
Chaykovsky. The brigade was planned to be based in Grozny and
Shali as part of a permanent Russian military presence in Chechnya, but was continuously engaged in the war from the beginning of its existence. The brigade included the 1387th, 1393rd, 1394th, and 1396th Separate Motor Rifle Battalions, 29th Separate Tank Battalion, 327th Separate Rocket Artillery Battalion, 321st Separate Self-Propelled Howitzer Artillery Battalion, 346th Separate Anti-Aircraft Missile Artillery Battalion, 1398th Separate Reconnaissance Battalion. The 147th Separate Electronic Warfare Company was formed as part of the brigade by 1 April 1996, and the 93rd Separate Engineer-Sapper Battalion and 584th Separate
Spetsnaz Company followed by 25 May. The 204th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Regiment was also formed as part of the brigade by 25 May, and included the 395th, 396th, and 427th Separate Motor Rifle Battalions in addition to the 435th Separate Self-Propelled Artillery Battalion. The 204th was first stationed at
Khankala with the objective of later deploying to
Shali. A proposal was made to reorganize the brigade to consist of two motor rifle regiments, the reconnaissance battalion, and the Spetsnaz company in May 1996, but this was not implemented due to being considered too cumbersome for the counterinsurgency war. During the war, the personnel of the brigade served at outposts and roadblocks, guarded important facilities, and often operated in conjunction with the
Internal Troops in the suppression of Chechen resistance. Brigade political officer Vyacheslav Izmailov, interviewed twenty years later, described his unit and the army in general as an "ill-trained rabble" only capable of "filling Chechnya with corpses" in a conflict that was "not a war, but banditry on both sides." He recalled one incident in which more conscripts were sent to the unit than they had food supplies for, which resulted in them being sent back to Russia when the Khankala battalion commander found that his replacements were malnourished to the extent that they could not walk to the canteen on their own. Indicative of the brigade's reputation was its wartime nickname Two Hundred Drunk (Двести пьяная), a play on the similarity of the Russian word for drunk and the word for fifth from its designation. Elements of the 205th participated in the 7 January 1996 operation to free hostages and eliminate the fighters in the village of
Pervomayskoye during the
Kizlyar–Pervomayskoye hostage crisis. The brigade was further engaged in the elimination of militants in Grozny following a
three-day siege of the Russian troops in March, and in the operations around the village of
Shalazhi and Komsomolskoye in July. Discipline was enforced harshly, with one battalion commander locking habitually absent without leave soldiers in a dryer room and personally administering beatings, and another using soldiers as unpaid labor to harvest crops on a local farm. By May 1999 the situation in the brigade had been improved with new officers and the discharge of most contract servicemen who had fought in the First Chechen War, and the completion of the barracks. The military justice system began to enforce discipline, with criminal cases for hazing, incitement to suicide, theft, and weapons selling, and punished the officers who had employed illegal disciplinary methods. The brigade continues to maintain its Cossack ties, with representatives of the Terek Cossacks being present at its ceremonies. After conscription was reintroduced in Chechnya in 2014, a large number of Chechen conscripts were sent to the brigade. Ethnic tensions between North Caucasian conscripts and ethnic Russians in the brigade led to a fight after which four Chechens were charged with assault in February 2015. There were reports of widespread discrimination against the Chechen conscripts arising from Russian ethnonationalism among brigade soldiers and the anti-Chechen attitude of brigade political officer Colonel Nikolay Borisenko. A motor rifle battalion chief of staff of the brigade, Captain Nikolay Afanasov, was killed by mortar fire on 10 July 2017 while serving as a military advisor to Syrian government troops in
Hama Governorate during the
Russian military intervention in the Syrian civil war. The 205th was committed to the
Russian invasion of Ukraine as part of the 49th Army. The
Ukrainian General Staff reported on 3 March 2022 that elements of the brigade were sent into combat from the reserves in an attack towards the outskirts of
Zaporizhzhia and
Mariupol. Units of the brigade briefly occupied the village of in
Mykolaiv Oblast during March 2022. According to Ukrainian officials, a unit of the brigade was responsible for the July 2022 deportation of 15 children from
Novopetrivka, Mykolaiv Oblast, to Russian territory. On June 6, 2023, Ukrainian officials claimed that the brigade was responsible for the destruction of the
Kakhovka Reservoir dam. On December 13, 2024, the brigade was awarded the "Guards" title. == Commanders ==