Russian troops forced to retreat in Ukraine were meant to be elite forces tough enough to fight NATO, UK intel says

• The Russian troops forced to retreat in Ukraine had a big reputation, UK intel said.
• The UK named the 1st Guards Tank Army army among those who ceded vast parts of the Kharkiv region

A Russian army forced to retreat in Ukraine was meant to be an elite tough enough to fight NATO, UK intel said.

Britain's Ministry of Defence said in a Tuesday intelligence update that the 1st Guards Tank Army (1 GTA) was among the Russian forces who fled the Kharkiv region in eastern Ukraine.

The troops were forced to retreat after Ukraine launched a swift counterattack in the last week, recapturing swaths of territory from Russian control in the region.

1 GTA was not fully equipped to deal with the offensive because it had suffered "heavy casualties" in the first few months of the war, the British update said.

The update described 1 GTA as "one of the most prestigious of Russia's armies," which is was charged with defending Moscow and leading counter-attacks in the case of a war with NATO.

"With 1 GTA and other WEMD formations severely degraded, Russia's conventional force designed to counter NATO is severely weakened. It will likely take years for Russia to rebuild this capability," the update said.

The retreat in Kharkiv is the latest in a string of heavy blows to Russian military prestige seen in the invasion of Ukraine.

Other units to lose their sheen include the elite paratroopers known as the VDV, as well as the wider Russian air force, which failed to overwhelm Ukraine's less-advanced counterpart.

Russia's Ministry of Defense confirmed that its forces retreated from some areas in the Kharkiv region, with a top official saying on Russian TV that Ukrainian forces outnumbered Russians by eight to one in the offensive, the BBC reported

The speed of the attack forced Russian soldiers to flee in any way they could reports on the ground said, including disguising themselves as locals.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nightly address on Monday that Ukraine had retaken around 2,300 square miles, or 6,000 square kilometers, since the start of September.

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, wrote in a Sunday analysis that the Kharkiv counteroffensive was a "major operational defeat" for Russia.