The 61st Jager Infantry Brigade is one of the youngest formations of the Mechanized Infantry of the Ukrainian Ground Forces, raised in 2015 as the 61st Motorized Infantry Brigade of the UGF's 4th Army Reserve Corps. Based in Zhytomyr Oblast, it is one of the Ground Forces' specialized formations, which help the Armed Forces of Ukraine defend the forest lands of the north as well as in the swampy terrain of the Pinsk Marshes, which are in the AOR of the brigade.
Brief history
The brigade, one of the newest formations to be established in the Ground Forces as a result of the expansion of this service in light of the ongoing War in Donbass, 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 ForcesGeneral 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. 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 foresty sectors within its AOR and thus is 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 for this important purpose of contributing to strengthening national defense in the northern territories of the state, alongside the personnel of 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 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 and in the former Imperial Russian Army, which stationed such units in the past in the Kiev and Odessa Military Districts.
