'You're Fucking Kidding Me,' One Ukrainian Soldier Mused as the Russians Attacked on Scooters

Electric scooters are popular in Russia—and increasingly common along the Ukraine front line

It’s increasingly common, in the 39th month of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, for Russian soldiers to roll into battle on electric scooters. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t tickle Ukrainian soldiers to observe a scooter assault. “You’re fucking kidding me,” one Ukrainian trooper mused (in a video translated by WarTranslated) as he watched a drone feed depicting Russians scooting toward the front line on their two-wheeled, rechargeable vehicles.

There’s no evidence these particular scooter troops came to a bad end. But plenty of the two-wheel peers have died violently trying and failing to cross the mine-seeded, artillery-pocked, drone-patrolled front line in western Russia and eastern and southern Ukraine.

The Ukrainians—and Russians, for that matter—should get used to it. “Russia is … likely to face reduced availability of armored vehicles over 2025 as it depletes stores of old vehicles and must depend upon newly produced platforms to replace losses,” Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds explained in a February report for the Royal United Services Institute in London.

Since Cold War vehicle stocks are low and Russian industry manages to build just a few thousand new armored vehicles a year—far too few to replace the 5,000 armored vehicles the Kremlin has written off each year for three years—civilian vehicles including scooters must make up the difference. The only alternative is walking into battle.

Unarmored rides

The civilian vehicles include Belarusian motorcycles, Chinese-made golf carts and old Soviet Lada cars, GAZ-69 trucks and bukhanka vans. But the e-scooters might be the most abundant of these emergency battlefield transports.

Russians love their e-scooters. Whoosh, which made its public offering two years ago, raising $24 million, stages thousands of its 80-pound, 25-mile-per-hour scooters at cities in Russia. Riders can rent one for less than 10 cents a minute—and zip along sidewalks in order to avoid congested roads.

When Ukrainian agents killed Russian general Igor Kirillov and his assistant Ilya Polikarpov in Moscow in December, they hid their bomb in a scooter. The vehicles are so ubiquitous, and many of their riders so drunk and reckless, that there’s growing pressure to crack down on or even ban them. Moscow imposed a nine-mile-per-hour speed limit.

All that is to say, there’s no shortage of scooters in Russia. And surplus scooters may become easier to source as irritated city-dwellers demand tighter restrictions on them. Having given up on fully equipping all of their assault troops with protected mobility in the form of armored vehicles, Russian commanders are racing to the bottom of Russia’s vehicular inventory.

Protection no longer matters, so availability is everything. And the scooters are nothing if not available. Until Russian troops make peace with walking across no-man’s-land, more and more of them will ride on scooters.

And die on them.

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