The brigade was raised in 2015 first as a reserve motorized formation of the Ground Forces Command, which would later be transferred in 2017–18 as part of the 4th Army Reserve Corps, with its first brigade HQ and garrison based in
Chernihiv,
Chernihiv Oblast. At first, the brigade was a motorized infantry unit with its own artillery regiment and 3 battalions, each former territorial defense battalions. On 25 April 2019, the formation, in compliance with a directive from the Ministry of Defense and the Armed Forces General Headquarters, left the reserves and was placed with its new designation as a light infantry unit under the
Operational Command North in
Zhytomyr, Zhytomyr Oblast. The majority of the servicemen of the brigade are personnel under contract service within the Ground Forces, many of them coming from the territory of the oblast and from the forested sectors within the brigade's AOR. They are thus equipped for forest and swamp warfare operations within its vicinity, especially in the Belarusian and Russian borders and in the swamplands of Pripyat in the north, working with personnel of the
Chief Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine and the Special Operations Forces, as well as the State Border Service. It is the terrain of the AOR of this brigade, which cannot be traversed by mechanized vehicles, that makes the brigade's duties all the more important in this part of Ukraine. Since parts of the AOR have had been covered by the Chernobyl excursion zone the brigade is planned to be also embarked in a specialized
CBRN defense capability in the coming years. The
Jager (Ukrainian:
єгерська) designation of the brigade, the first Ukrainian unit to bear this title after more than a century, is of German origin in the same-named light infantry formations of the
German Army, the defunct
Austro-Hungarian Army and in the former
Imperial Russian Army, which stationed such units in the past in the Kyiv and Odesa Military Districts. In 2022, the infantry brigade was mechanized from being a light motorized unit. Amongst other things, it gained RM-70 rocket-launchers from the Czech Republic. The brigade fought on the southern front of
Ukraine's fall 2022 counteroffensive. On 9 August, the brigade's 99th Battalion published a video from
Sudzha, claiming that the town had come under Ukrainian control. The brigade was still operating in Kursk as of February 2025. == Organization ==