Mayhem and Motorcycles in Ukraine East
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| By Andrew E. Kramer and Maria VarenikovaPhotographs by Daniel Berehulak |
Reported from Toretsk, New York, and elsewhere in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine
The New York Times
They first appeared as a cloud of dust on the horizon. A few seconds later, the motorcycles carrying Russian soldiers sped into view, zigzagging across a field, kicking up dust, and attempting a noisy, dangerous run at a Ukrainian trench.
“They moved fast, they spread out and they swerved,” said Lt. Mykhailo Hubitsky, describing the Russian motorcycle assault he witnessed. It’s a type of attack that has been proliferating along the frontline this spring, adding a wild new element to the already violent, chaotic fighting.
Russian soldiers riding motorcycles, dirt bikes, quadricycles, and dune buggies now account for about half of all attacks in some areas of the front, soldiers and commanders say, as Moscow’s forces attempt to use speed to cross exposed open spaces where its lumbering armored vehicles are easy targets.
These non-conventional vehicles have been turning up with such frequency that some Ukrainian trenches now overlook junkyards of abandoned, blown-up off-road vehicles, videos from reconnaissance drones show.
The new tactic is the latest Russian adaptation for a heavily mined, continually surveilled battlefield, as Moscow’s forces work to achieve small tactical gains, often of just a few hundred yards.
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“We are fighting a war over every meter,” said Captain Yaroslav, an artillery commander with the 80th Air Assault Brigade, who earlier this week was firing rockets toward Russian lines. He provided only his first name for security reasons.
Russia nevertheless remains the army on the offensive. Over time, its gains have added up and the Russian military is now close to strategically important supply lines and towns in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
Since capturing the city of Bakhmut in May 2023, a Russian offensive to the west advanced about three miles over more than a year. It is now stalled at a water canal near the town of Chasiv Yar.
But now the Russians are threatening to flank Ukrainian positions there, while also approaching a key Ukrainian supply line, the Pokrovsk-Kostyantynivka highway.
ImageA man grieving his son’s death covers his eyes with his left hand while leaning on a vehicle whose window was shattered by a missile.
The Russians’ farthest advance in the region is 15 miles from its starting point.
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| Petro Kozoriz grieves at the spot where his son Eduard was killed in a Russian missile strike in Pokrovsk. |
A man lays flowers on a gravesite as the woman to his left touches the grave marker of her husband.
A woman in Pokrovsk named Yuliia grieves at the funeral of her husband, Eduard Kozoriz.
The risk to this supply route adds new urgency to the fighting along this section of the front. If the Russians take control of that road or even threaten it, it would slow the flow of food, weapons, and ammunition the Ukrainian army needs to fight in the Donbas. On Monday, two Russian missiles narrowly missed a key bridge on the highway. The strike left the bridge intact but resulted in fatalities and injuries, regional authorities said.
Beyond that, the Russian advance also threatened two Ukrainian-held towns, Toretsk and New York, the latter a small dot on the Ukrainian plains that took the name in the 19th century. If these towns fall, Russia would be poised to press on toward the largest remaining Ukrainian-held cities in the region, Kostyantynivka, Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk, and Slovyansk.
Authorities this month stepped up evacuations of civilians from Toretsk and New York, removing the few remaining residents by vans amid heavy bombardment.
Inside the partially encircled towns, Russian artillery bombardments echo through mostly deserted streets. Plumes of gray smoke rise from strikes. Along nearly every block in New York is a small brick house with a roof smashed in by an artillery shell. In the Donbas, every town Russia has captured since its full-scale invasion in 2022 has been bombed to ruins.
The evacuations are done hastily, with residents having just a few minutes to load one or two bags into vans and part from houses they have occupied for lifetimes.
Man stand and cries where his son was killed
Soldiers stand basically in the dark, save for a stream of sunlight and a string of green lights.
Soldiers chat as they wait for instructions to fire their howitzers at Russian positions.
“Boom, boom, boom,” was how one evacuee, Alina Olyak, 69, a retired nurse, described conditions in the town of Toretsk over the past week as the Russian army made incremental advances over the fields.
“I say goodbye to my lovely city,” Ms. Olyak said. The Russian army is now about a mile from the city center. The van that evacuated Ms. Olyak on Monday was destroyed on Tuesday by a spray of shrapnel from a Russian rocket, wounding one of the volunteers who had been carrying out evacuations.
As its army advances, Russia has experimented with multiple approaches to crossing exposed fields. The latest is the assault on motorcycles.
With reconnaissance drones ubiquitous in the skies over the Donbas, the armored vehicles of both armies are easy targets. The faster-moving motorcycles and buggies are harder to hit with artillery. The drawback is that they provide no protection for Russian soldiers, who are exposed to a hail of machine gun fire as they approach the trenches.
Sometimes the bikers get through if Russian artillery bombardments succeed in preventing Ukrainian soldiers from poking their heads above the trench. The tactic solves, though at great risk, a key tactical challenge of the war in Ukraine for both sides: how to cross a mined, open field while observed by drones and under artillery fire.
If they make it across a field, the riders cast aside their bikes, enter the Ukrainian trench and engage in close combat on foot.
“They jump off and start shooting,” said a Ukrainian sergeant, Sapsan, serving with the 47th Mechanized Brigade, who asked to be identified only by a nickname, in keeping with his unit’s security protocols. “These buggies and motorcycles are fast and fly right into our tree lines.”
Like the wave of infantry assaults that Russia used to capture Bakhmut last year, the motorcycle assaults result in huge casualties, Ukrainian soldiers say. These attacks have not supplanted the Russian military’s employing of its blunt advantage in numbers of artillery guns and quantity of ammunition to advance. It is an additional tactic.
The use of cheap, disposable dirt bikes and buggies helps conserve Russian armored vehicles as the Russian military resorts to drawing on stockpiles of outdated tanks dating to the Cold War.
The new motorcycle tactics are executed in tandem with another atypical form of attack that takes an opposite strategy of going in bulky and slowly. Russians weld sheet metal armor to tanks for protection against exploding drones, creating boxy structures the size of a house, known a turtle tanks. The gigantic, lumbering vehicles creak and crawl over the fields, and have become another bizarre sight turning up on Donbas battlefields.
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| Ukrainian soldiers look up into the sky at a Russian drone as one soldier points toward it. |
Ukrainian antiaircraft gunners monitor an airborne Russian drone from their position near Bakhmut and Toretsk.
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| Injured soldiers lying on gurneys are being treated by paramedics in a makeshift medical building. |
Ukrainian paramedics of the Fifth Assault Brigade treated soldiers with drone- and shrapnel-related injuries on Friday.
On the fields, motorcycle riders have good visibility and can swerve to avoid mines that armored vehicle operators might not see, Ukrainian soldiers said. Or they ride along tracks left by armored vehicles in earlier assaults, knowing these routes will be free of mines.
But riders have no protection from artillery shrapnel exploding around them. And once they approach the Ukrainian trenches, they are exposed to a fusillade of machine gun fire.
“How they find people willing to do this, I don’t know,” said Volodymyr, a sergeant who also asked to be identified only by his first name, in keeping with military protocol. “Sometimes, none of them will maket, sometimes all of them.”
Ukraine also counters the motorcycle assaults with exploding quadcopter drones steered by an operator wearing virtual reality goggles, an improvised weapon that emerged in the war in Ukraine and has reshaped the battlefield for its ability to hit armored vehicles on the move.
All of these obstacles can prove lethal, as was the case for the assault that Lieutenant Hubitsky witnessed when eight or nine dirt bike riders charged the Ukrainian trenches.
Once the riders came into range, Ukrainian soldiers opened fire with machine guns, Lieutenant Hubitsky said. The swerving dirt bikes were hard targets, he said. Some were hit, others not. But in that instance, too few Russians survived the ride to form an effective unit to storm the Ukrainian trench. The survivors, who abandoned their bikes at the edge of the field, were killed in close combat, he said.
That hasn’t deterred Russian commanders from continuing to employ the tactic. “All the tree lines,” said Sapsan, a sergeant in the 47th Brigade, “are now full of these buggies and motorcycles.”
Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contributed reporting from the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
Andrew E. Kramer is the Kyiv bureau chief for The Times, who has been covering the war in Ukraine since 2014. More about Andrew E. Kramer
Maria Varenikova covers Ukraine and its war with Russia. More about Maria Varenikova
Daniel Berehulak is a staff photographer for The Times based in Mexico City. More about Daniel Berehulak
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