13 hours ago
Putin's ‘suicide bikers' speed into no man's land to cause chaos
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.
