Russia's Scooter Troops Don't Live Long on the Battlefield
But they don't have to for Russian forces to advance
Yes, Russian troops really are riding into battle on electric scooters. Yes, it’s usually suicide for the unfortunate scooter troopers. No, that doesn’t mean Russia can’t gain ground in Ukraine.
On or just before Friday, Russian forces probed the lines of the Ukrainian 120th Territorial Defense Brigade just outside Andriivka in eastern Ukraine. The probe was part of a wider series of Russian attacks in recent days—attacks that have cost the Russians potentially hundreds if not thousands of casualties without resulting in significant Russian gains.
The Ukrainian territorials’ surveillance drones spotted the Russians coming—some of them on scooters. For at least a year now, Russian regiments have equipped some troops with the $250 electric scooters as replacements for increasingly rare armored vehicles.
The territorials’ explosive first-person-view drones, cluster artillery and small arms defeated the Russian probe. “Russian occupiers have no place in Ukraine,” crowed Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, the Ukrainian commander-in-chief. “Our warriors prove this undeniable truth every day.”
“I see several things happening in Ukraine right now,” wrote Andrew Perpetua, a leading open-source intelligence analyst.
For starters, “Ukraine has pivoted to a drone-based defense,” Perpetua explained. Thus “most of the gains you see Russia making right now are coming as a result of one of two things.” Either “inferior Ukrainian drone units or … overwhelming numerical superiority.”
A drone-based defense, bolstered by mines, artillery and other firepower, “plays into Ukraine’s needs,” Perpetua noted. It “relies on fewer people to defend a stretch of area.” A deepening shortage of trained infantry is one of the biggest problems inside the Ukrainian armed forces.
But there’s a catch for the under-strength Ukrainian brigades. A drone-first defense “also makes a more brittle front line.” “Once Russians break through the defense, Ukraine doesn’t have many forces available to push Russia back out. They simply lack the infantry.”
So the Ukrainians kill Russian scooter troops—or motorcycle troops or soldiers riding in Lada compact cars or antique GAZ-69 trucks—and defeat repeated probes until the drones run out or their operators collapse from overwork. And that’s when the next wave of scooter troops breaks through … and discovers there are no Ukrainian reinforcements to block the advance.
It’s not for no reason that, despite staggering losses now totaling around 800,000 dead, maimed and missing—nearly triple Ukraine’s own losses—Russia is still acting as though it’s winning the war. There are 38 million people in Ukraine, and 144 million in Russia. “There is a fundamental issue—Ukraine’s smaller mobilization base and poor mobilization campaign,” Ukrainian analysis group Frontelligence Insight warned.
The Kremlin has crunched the same numbers and arrived at the same conclusion: that Kyiv could reach a manpower breaking point first. Russian leadership therefore “believes that it can sustain the current rate of attrition through 2025,” the analysts at the Royal United Services Institute in London concluded.
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