Storm-Z () is a series of penal military units established by Russia by April 6, 2023, at the latest. On June 24, 2023 Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a law disbanding Storm-Z and replacing it with new Storm-V units. However, on 12 February 2024, Dmytro Riumshyn, the commander of Ukraine's 47th Mechanized Brigade, claimed that Russian forces were deploying regular troops, sabotage groups, as well as both "Storm-Z" and "Storm-V" penal units in Avdiivka.
Storm-Z () is a series of penal military units established by Russia by April 6, 2023, at the latest. On June 24, 2023 Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a law disbanding Storm-Z and replacing it with new Storm-V units. However, on 12 February 2024, Dmytro Riumshyn, the commander of Ukraine's 47th Mechanized Brigade, claimed that Russian forces were deploying regular troops, sabotage groups, as well as both "Storm-Z" and "Storm-V" penal units in Avdiivka.
==History== ===Formation=== The existence of the Storm-Z units was first uncovered on April 6, 2023, when Ukrainian forces captured documents detailing their penal recruitment and formations. The Russian Ministry of Defence modeled the units after the Wagner Group's penal recruitment after their falling out with Wagner's former leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin. The unit's members are recruited from Russian prisons on the premise that successful service would result in a deduction of their sentence, as well as earn them $2,200 a month. The Institute for the Study of War assessed that the Storm-Z units would be attached to Russian forces undergoing battle fatigue. They also reported that each company consisted of 100 men broken into four capture squads of 10 persons each, four fire support squads of 10 persons each, a 2-person command element, a 5-person combat engineering group, an 8-person reconnaissance group, a 3-person medevac group, and a 2-person UAV crew. Each company would only receive 10 to 15 days of training before being sent into active combat, namely in urban fighting in the Battle of Bakhmut and the Battle of Avdiivka. Various Russian commands and units have had Storm-Z companies attached to them, first seeing service in the 8th Guards Combined Arms Army of Russia and the 1st Army Corps, the armed forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic. British intelligence has stated that Russian commanders often punish soldiers who abuse drugs and alcohol by forcing them to fight in Storm-Z detachments. According to both British intelligence and Russian military bloggers, Storm-Z have been sustaining between 40 and 70% losses attempting to take the city of Avdiivka.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).