Into the chaos of no man’s land ride the Russian soldiers. Flying across the steppe at 50mph on cheap Chinese motorbikes, their objective is to breach Ukrainian defences and cause havoc behind enemy lines.
But few will ever make it. Most are picked off by drones or artillery fire. Some self-destruct by crashing in the mogul field of shell craters. The life expectancy of those who do survive the journey is little improved, stranded and surrounded by the enemy as they are.
“Basically it’s a suicide mission,” Yevhen, a lieutenant captain in Ukraine’s 28th brigade, said flatly. “Because they never come back.”
Nonetheless, these latter-day cavalry charges — on what the Russian army refers to as its “iron horses” — are a growing feature of Moscow’s military strategy, in response to the ever greater pervasiveness of drones, which account for up to 70 per cent of all casualties.
The onset of summer has brought redoubled offensive action. Russian forces are currently making more than 200 assaults along the front line each day, more than twice the figure for April.
Of those, roughly two fifths are taking place around Pokrovsk — one of the last Ukrainian strongholds in the Donbas region — and the nearby town of Toretsk, both of which have long been thorns in the side of Russia’s ambitions to capture the region in its entirety.
About three months ago motorbikes first appeared along the stretch of the front around Toretsk that Yevhen, 33, and his brigade have held since November 2022. Within a few weeks, motorcycle assaults had become a daily occurrence, in which between ten and 20 bikers spread across a width of about 400m would hurtle towards them as the sun rose.
Because of their speed and scattered grouping they are difficult to intercept, requiring a high level of skill from the drone pilots chasing them. But the area of no man’s land is so wide here that usually only about a quarter will make it across.
Those that do will typically seek to target enemy drone and mortar crews, who are less well-armed than regular infantrymen, and cause as much damage as they can before ultimately being liquidated or captured themselves, Yevhen said.
Yehven, a lieutenant captain in Ukraine’s 28th brigade
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“But it’s not death for nothing,” he said. “If you repeat this process again and again you will eventually overload our capabilities because we have to spend a lot of time and resources looking for those who make it through. It helps them to take more territory.”
Russia began using motorbikes last year, initially as a grassroots initiative among certain regiments faced with heavy losses from traditional infantry raids in which slow-moving groups of soldiers would become easy targets for enemy fire. The idea caught on and their use has been formally integrated into the army’s assault tactics, with some units now given specialised rider training.
In April, Russia’s ministry of defence released a video showing a paratrooper with a gun over his shoulder riding around a motocross track while explosions detonated around him. The ministry plans to equip more than half of its infantry forces with motorcycles, as well as other light vehicles such as quadbikes and buggies, according to leaked documents seen by Frontelligence Insight, a Ukrainian open-source intelligence agency.
Ukraine is also beginning to use motorbikes more and more, though mostly as a means of troop transportation to and from the front. Unlike the lightweight off-road bikes imported from China that Russia uses, these are often Ukrainian-made electric bikes that make less noise, enabling the rider to listen out for the whirr of an approaching drone.
Yehven recalls first seeing Russian troops on motorbikes about three months ago, targeting the section of the front line that his brigade has held
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However, motorbikes remain an imperfect solution to the problem of ubiquitous drones, which have not only made the battlefield more lethal but also expanded the contested territory that separates the two armies.
The conflict has now moved on from the phase in which both sides faced off in two rows of trenches reminiscent of the First World War.
Drones, which provide both an all-seeing eye into enemy territory as well as precision strike capability, have rendered supply lines vulnerable to constant attack, therefore making it much more difficult to feed the front line with troops, ammunition and sustenance.
In Dobropillia, a town at the rear of Ukraine’s operations in Pokrovsk, the roads are lined with tall netting to prevent drones from striking vehicles flowing to and from the front.
What exists now is an area known as the “grey zone”, a wasteland of shattered villages and churned earth, as wide as 18 miles in some areas, including around Toretsk. Positions are more fluid here, with soldiers living in dugouts and in the basement of houses.
To get to the grey zone, rather than riding in armoured personnel carriers as they did in the past, troops go on foot armed with a shotgun to shoot down incoming drones, walking for miles through fields and avoiding the roads. Supplies are increasingly transported using vampire drones, which can carry a load of 10kg, or on ground drones, which can carry up to 400kg.
“There are so many drones everywhere you are in constant danger,” said “Chemist”, a sergeant from the 68th brigade, drinking coffee during a day of respite inside a low wooden house in Dobropillia, requisitioned by the army for the housing of soldiers.
“Now every infantryman is trained to operate on the principle that to be invisible is to survive, which before was a principle reserved only for units operating behind enemy lines.”
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Having failed to take Pokrovsk from the east over the winter, Ukrainian intelligence believes that Russia is now trying to outflank the city from the west by taking control of the road that leads from Kostiantynivka, an important logistics hub roughly 35 miles away.
The city has been considered on the verge of defeat for more than a year and yet Ukraine has managed to hold on, and may well continue to do so for some time to come, said Nick Reynolds, an analyst of the conflict at the Royal United Services.
Drones, the defining weapon of this war, have made mass movement of troops far more difficult now for both sides. Instead, the Russians are trying to slowly asphyxiate their opponent by cutting off its supplies.
In this, they have had more success recently around Kostiantynivka after the arrival of Rubicon and Judgement Day, two elite Russian drone units established at the end of last year.
The units are better trained than regular forces and have better equipment, including a greater number of thermal drones that have illuminate the grey zone during the night — hitherto a time of safety when battlefield evacuations of the wounded could take place. Death now hovers constantly in the sky.
“You want to try and impose some kind of rules here, but the truth is this war has become more cruel and more deadly over the years,” sighed Yevhen, who has served his country since 2019. “You have much less chance to survive these days.”
Additional reporting by Viktoria Sybir