Motorcycles and chaos in eastern Ukraine

They first appeared as a cloud of dust on the horizon. A few seconds later, the motorcycles carrying Russian soldiers came into view, zigzagging across a field, kicking up dust, and attempting a noisy, dangerous run toward a Ukrainian trench.

“They moved quickly, they spread out and they swerved,” said Lt. Mykhailo Hubitsky, describing the Russian motorcycle attack he saw. It’s a type of attack that has spread along the front lines this spring, adding a wild new element to the already violent, chaotic fighting.

Russian soldiers on motorcycles, dirt bikes, four-wheelers and dune buggies are now responsible for about half of all attacks in some parts of the front, soldiers and commanders say, as Moscow’s forces try to use speed to cross exposed open spaces where the bulky armored vehicles are easy targets.

These unconventional vehicles are appearing so frequently that some Ukrainian trenches are now overlooking scrap yards of abandoned, blown-up all-terrain vehicles, videos from reconnaissance drones show.

The new tactic is the latest Russian use on a battlefield that is full of mines and under constant surveillance. Moscow’s forces are trying to make small tactical gains, often of just a few hundred meters.

The furthest Russian advance in the region is 24 kilometers from the starting point.

“We are fighting a war for every meter,” said Capt. Yaroslav, an artillery commander with the 80th Air Assault Brigade, which fired rockets into Russian lines earlier this week. He only gave his first name for security reasons.

Russia nevertheless maintains its military on the offensive. Over time, the gains have added up and the Russian military is now close to strategically important supply lines and cities in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

Since the capture of the city of Bakhmut in May 2023, a Russian offensive to the west has advanced about five kilometers in just over a year. It is now stuck at a water channel near the town of Khasiv Yar.

But now the Russians are threatening to flank Ukrainian positions there, while also approaching a key Ukrainian supply line, the Pokrovsk-Kostyantynivka highway.

The risk to this supply route adds new urgency to the fighting along this part 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 that the Ukrainian army needs to fight in the Donbas. On Monday, two Russian missiles narrowly missed a major highway bridge. The strike left the bridge intact but resulted in deaths and injuries, regional authorities said.

In addition, the Russian advance also threatens two Ukrainian-occupied cities, Toretsk and New York, the latter a small dot on the Ukrainian plains that took that name in the 19th century. If these cities fall, Russia would be ready to move on to the largest remaining Ukrainian-occupied cities in the region, Kostjantynivka, Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk and Slovyansk.

This month, authorities stepped up the evacuation of civilians from Toretsk and New York. The few remaining residents were evacuated by vans amid heavy bombardment.

Within the partially surrounded towns, Russian artillery bombardments echo through the largely deserted streets. Plumes of gray smoke rise from attacks. Along almost every block in New York is a small brick house with a roof destroyed by an artillery shell. In the Donbas, every city Russia has captured since the massive invasion in 2022 has been bombed into ruins.

The evacuations are being carried out in haste, with residents having only minutes to load a bag or two into vans and say goodbye to homes they have lived in their entire lives.

“Boom, boom, boom,” is how one of the evacuees, Alina Olyak, 69, a retired nurse, described conditions in the town of Toretsk over the past week as the Russian army advanced further across the fields.

“I am saying goodbye to my beautiful city,” Ms. Olyak said. The Russian army is now about a mile from the city center. The van in which Ms. Olyak was evacuated on Monday was destroyed by shrapnel from a Russian rocket on Tuesday, injuring one of the volunteers who had been carrying out evacuations.

As the army advances, Russia has experimented with multiple approaches to crossing open fields, the latest being the motorcycle attack.

With reconnaissance drones ubiquitous in the skies over the Donbas, armored vehicles of both armies are easy targets. The faster-moving motorcycles and buggies are harder to hit with artillery. The downside is that they offer no protection to Russian soldiers, who are exposed to a hail of machine-gun fire as they approach the trenches.

Sometimes the bikers get through when Russian artillery bombardments manage to keep Ukrainian soldiers from sticking their heads above the trench. The tactic, though risky, solves a key tactical challenge of the war in Ukraine for both sides: how to cross an open, mined field while being observed by drones and under artillery fire.

Crossing a field, the riders throw their bikes aside, enter the Ukrainian trench and engage in close-quarters combat on foot.

“They jump off and start shooting,” said a Ukrainian sergeant, Sapsan, who served with the 47th Mechanized Brigade, who asked to be identified only by a nickname in accordance with his unit’s security protocols. “These buggies and motorcycles are fast and fly right into our tree line.”

Like the wave of infantry assaults Russia used last year to capture Bakhmut, the motorcycle attacks are causing huge losses, Ukrainian soldiers say. These attacks have not replaced the Russian military’s commitment to advancing in terms of the number of artillery guns and the amount of ammunition. It is a complementary tactic.

By deploying cheap disposable dirt bikes and buggies, Russian armored vehicles can be spared as the Russian military falls back on stockpiles of outdated tanks dating back to the Cold War.

The new motorcycle tactics are carried out in combination with another atypical form of attack that uses an opposite strategy, namely extensive and slow intervention. Russians weld sheet steel armor to tanks to protect against exploding drones, creating boxy structures the size of houses known as turtle tanks. The gigantic, cumbersome vehicles creak and crawl across the fields, and have become a bizarre sight appearing on the battlefields of the Donbas.

In the fields, motorcyclists have good visibility and can swerve to avoid mines that armored vehicle drivers may not see, Ukrainian soldiers said. Or they drive over tracks left by armored vehicles in previous attacks, knowing that these routes will be clear of mines.

But riders have no protection from artillery fragments exploding around them, and as soon as they approach the Ukrainian trenches, they are exposed to a barrage of machine guns.

“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 accordance with military protocol. “Sometimes none of them make it, sometimes all of them.”

Ukraine is also combating motorcycle attacks with exploding quadcopter drones controlled by an operator wearing virtual reality goggles, an improvised weapon that emerged in Ukraine’s war and has reshaped the battlefield for its ability to hit armored vehicles on the move.

All these obstacles can be deadly, as was the case with the attack that Lieutenant Hubitsky witnessed, when eight or nine motocross riders attacked the Ukrainian trenches.

As soon as the riders came within range, Ukrainian soldiers opened fire with machine guns, Lt. Hubitsky said. The swinging dirt bikes were tough targets, he said. Some were affected, some were not. But in that case, too few Russians survived the drive to form an effective unit to storm the Ukrainian trench. The survivors, who left their bicycles at the edge of the field, were killed in close-quarters fighting, he said.

That has not stopped Russian commanders from continuing to use 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 in eastern Ukraine.