The Fate of the BTG
A post-publication investigation into what happened to the Balan Order’s battalion — and whether the missile strike on its training ground, four days after Russia published the order, was connected to it. Both questions now have answers.
Our analysis of the Balan Order [No. 001] closed with a list of what the document could not, by itself, establish. Two items on that list are answerable from other open sources: whether the battalion tactical group the order prepared actually executed its deployment, and whether the Russian missile strike on its Starichi training ground — on 13 March 2022, four days after Russia published the order — was connected to it.
This investigation, conducted in July 2026, answers both. It does not revise the primary-source reading of the order itself; it adds the operational aftermath the document could only point toward. As with the original, every quotation is verbatim from the cited record, and every inference is labeled.
The finding cuts both ways, and honesty requires stating both. It is the strongest context yet for a defensive reading of the order — and it definitively excludes the characterization the fact-checking record preserved: “routine training,” “nothing to do with” Donbas.
The approach was to work backward from the dead. Every named fatality of the 13 March strike was attributed to a unit using the Ukrainian-language security-forces loss registers, the Memorial.UA database, and funeral press coverage. The same sources reconstructed where the BTG’s constituent units — the 4th Operational-Purpose Brigade, the 27th Brigade, the Guards Aviation Base, the Joint Communications Center — actually fought between 23 February and 31 March 2022. Commander interviews and the brigades’ official unit histories supplied the operational framework. [06][07]
Of the 61–64 dead in the strike, roughly fifteen have been publicly named and unit-attributed; some 27 were never named. The negative finding below therefore rests on the named subset plus the total absence of any National Guard unit across press, memorial-database, and funeral coverage.
Every named fatality belongs to the training establishment or to units incidentally present: officers of the Hetman Sahaidachnyi National Army Academy, the 184th Training Center, the 355th Training Mechanized and 356th Training Artillery regiments, IPSC staff, officers of the 24th and 53rd Mechanized brigades, and mobilized reservists. Not one attributes to the 4th Operational-Purpose Brigade, the 27th Brigade, the Guards Aviation Base, or the Joint Communications Center — nor to the 80th Air Assault Brigade. No National Guard unit appears in coverage of the strike at all, consistent with the BTG having departed before it. [06][07]
Ukraine’s prosecution attributes the targeting to a person, not the captured order — and that attribution is now adjudicated fact. On 23 May 2024 the Halytskyi District Court of Lviv convicted Oleksandr Kostornyi, a former KGB officer, of state treason and sentenced him to 15 years; the Ternopil Appellate Court rejected his appeal on 4 March 2025. The courts found that on 4 March 2022 — five days before Russia published the Balan Order — he transmitted maps of the facility’s barracks and dormitories to two Russian handlers via Telegram, one an FSB officer, Yuriy Vodolazky, who had requested information on “military objects” “related to the polygon.” The impact pattern matches: officers’ dormitory, a tent encampment of mobilized volunteers, medical facilities. By mid-March the IPSC was also the International Legion’s intake hub — a high-value target on its own profile. With the targeting chain court-established as beginning before publication, the four-day publication-to-strike sequence is assessed, with high confidence, as coincidental. A second Lviv treason case (№ 461/1308/23) records another suspect indicted “for providing information regarding the shelling of the Yavoriv polygon,” linked to Kostornyi — so per Ukrainian prosecutors the strike’s human targeting had more than one source. [05]
The 4th Brigade’s official history states that on the eve of the invasion “practically all combat-capable units of the Rubizh Brigade arrived in Luhansk Oblast” for JFO tasks. The Hero of Ukraine citation for Junior Sergeant Oleksandr Tymchenko records the mechanism: on 23 February 2022 the brigade’s operational reserve was urgently redeployed to Luhansk. On 24 February a battalion tactical group took positions outside Trokhizbenka in the Shchastia district; on 26 February it fought a delaying action against a column of sixteen T-72s — enabling the 57th Motorized and 79th Air Assault brigades to withdraw toward Severodonetsk. Court-recited brigade records place its 1st Operational Battalion (on APCs) in combat at Rubizhne by 8 March, with further losses there on 16 March. Hostomel, the engagement the brigade is famous for, was fought by a company tactical group of ~150 guardsmen and remaining garrison personnel — not the main body. [01][02][03]
In a May 2024 interview, Ihor Skybiuk — the 80th’s commander in 2022, later commander of the Air Assault Forces — described the brigade’s position on 24 February:
“At Shyrokyi Lan [training ground, Mykolaiv Oblast]… We had the status of the reserve of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces… around mid-March 2022 we were to enter the JFO zone and relieve the 79th Brigade… They were positioned then in the area of Shchastia and Stanytsia Luhanska.”
Skybiuk added it was luck the invasion did not catch the 79th and 80th mid-rotation, in echelons or at rail stations. The invasion caught the 80th at Shyrokyi Lan and diverted it south — to Shylova Balka, the Kherson approaches, Mykolaiv, then Voznesensk — with elements pre-positioned in the Chornobyl zone on bridge demolitions. [04][10]
Read together, these facts give the Balan Order’s deployment clause a name, a place, and a date. The order prepares a National Guard BTG for “combat (special) tasks in the operation of Joint Forces as part of a brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” ready by 28 February, with rail movement of armor to follow. The brigade it was subordinated to was scheduled to enter the JFO zone in mid-March 2022 and take over the Shchastia–Stanytsia Luhanska sector of the northern Luhansk contact line from the 79th.
The straightforward reconstruction: the BTG was the National Guard’s augmentation to the 80th’s brigade group for that rotation — the concrete, sector-level implementation of the Zaluzhny directive’s “buildup of capabilities of the grouping of joint forces in the territory of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.” In this light the 6 February “operational subordination” was administrative: the BTG would train at Starichi while the 80th finished its own cycle at Shyrokyi Lan, the two converging on the mid-March JFO entry.
A relief-in-place rotation is, formally, routine posture. This is the strongest context yet for reading the BTG as part of a scheduled defensive rotation rather than a stand-alone offensive strike package.
The rotation would still place a fresh, capability-augmented elite grouping — the 80th plus mobile SIGINT, a sniper strike package, UAVs, double loads — on the contact line opposite Luhansk city. That fits a hardened defense of the Shchastia axis; it is equally the standard first move in preparing a sector for later operations.
“A standard order to hold regular joint training exercises,” with “nothing to do with” Donbas. The National Guard’s own units executed a Donbas commitment on the eve of the invasion, and the ZSU brigade named in the order was weeks from a Donbas contact-line deployment. Russian forces attacked toward Shchastia immediately on 24 February; the delaying action the 4th Brigade fought at Trokhizbenka was in exactly the sector the reinforcement rotation was being prepared for.
A second evidence pass drew on three public bodies that quote military paperwork verbatim: Ukraine’s Unified State Register of Court Decisions — 136 million documents in which service and military-offense cases recite unit orders and certificates — the National Guard’s own February 2022 website recovered through the Internet Archive, and RUSI’s General-Staff-sourced study of the war’s first phase. [14][15][16]
A rifleman of the 1st Operational Battalion (on APCs) was “on service assignment from 23.02.2022 to 08.03.2022 … in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts,” and was killed at Rubizhne on 8 March 2022. The brigade’s own personnel paperwork — quoted by a court — dates the Donbas deployment from 23 February and places a named BTG battalion in combat inside the JFO zone twelve days later. Companion rulings recite the sequential certificate for a second soldier of the same 1st Operational Battalion and a master sergeant of the 2nd Operational Battalion, both killed at Rubizhne — so both of the brigade’s operational battalions were in the Luhansk grouping, which is also why the register alone cannot say which had been the Starichi BTG.
A 2021 disability case (№ 140/5309/21) recites a plaintiff’s post: “sniper (1st category), sniper platoon, special-purpose company” of the Kulchytsky operational-reserve battalion, military unit 3066 — the exact unit type and internal structure Section 10 of the Balan Order draws its sniper group and fire-support element from.
A negative-space test across the register: «два боєкомплекти» (two combat loads) appears in one document, «подвійний боєкомплект» in one — effectively absent from the largest corpus of quoted Ukrainian military paperwork, where provisioning orders are recited daily. Caveat, stated plainly: absence from litigation recitals is not absence from classified orders — but the contrast with the ubiquity of ordinary provisioning language is stark.
A 2016 case records a whole unit relocating to the Yavoriv polygon for combat cohesion, remaining ~four months, then redeploying east. Cohesion-at-Yavoriv-then-Donbas was standard; the Balan Order’s distinctiveness is the compressed five-week generation of a composite, cross-ministry BTG with attached enablers — not the venue or the sequence.
The NGU’s website, captured 7 February 2022, announces that “for the first time, collective training of a battalion tactical group has begun” — a Southern-command unit at the NGU’s International Center at Stare, Kyiv Oblast (a different facility from Starichi), for a month-long cycle with Canadian Operation UNIFIER instructors. Two National Guard BTGs in month-long collective training the same week, in different commands, is concrete evidence of a multi-command BTG-generation wave — consistent with the multi-segment upstream directive spawning parallel orders. Caveat: the Stare cycle could be pre-planned annual training; its timing and “first-ever” framing argue otherwise but do not prove linkage.
A 14 February capture describes «Заметіль-2022» as month-long joint command-staff exercises “across the entire territory of the state,” involving Ukraine’s whole security and defense sector — upgrading the Snowstorm item in No. 001 from secondary reporting to the Guard’s own contemporaneous statement. The same archive shows the 27th Brigade — source of the order’s sniper group — returned from its JFO rotation on 29 October 2021, and thus at garrison and available when the order tasked it.
RUSI’s General-Staff-sourced study describes the pre-invasion posture: more than half of ~20 combat-ready brigades in the east, ten covering the JFO line at ~20 km frontage, a limited reserve, a maneuver-defense doctrine of counterattacking breaches, and ~10 days of ammunition per brigade. A fresh, capability-augmented BTG attached to an air assault brigade, rotating into the Shchastia–Stanytsia Luhanska sector, reads most naturally as reinforcing the counterattack capacity of a thinly held line — coherent with the relief-in-place reconstruction, and further marginalizing both extremes.
Directive № 39/304/78/1 returns zero results in the court register — where order numbers are recited constantly — and zero on the indexed web. It has never leaked into litigation or open publication. The realistic remaining paths to it are hacker-dump archives, Russian trophy-document publications, or official Ukrainian disclosure.
None of these unknowns bears on the two questions this investigation set out to answer. They bear on precision — the exact unit, the exact road, the exact tent — not on the established facts: the parent brigade fought in the Donbas, the receiving brigade was bound for it, and the strike that destroyed the training ground was aimed by a spy, not by the order.
Method. Casualty-unit back-test cross-referencing named fatalities against unit rosters, plus a movement reconstruction of the BTG’s constituent units, 23 Feb–31 Mar 2022. Quotations are verbatim; the Skybiuk passage is given in the original Ukrainian with translation. Inferences are labeled in-text (“most parsimonious,” “an inference”). Full URLs are preserved in the working file yavoriv-strike-backtest.md.