Over three years of fighting, the grim reality of the Ukraine battlefield has been to adapt or die, which has led to innovations that have changed the face of warfare.
Perhaps the greatest changes have been the use of drones, which have become so deadly that Russia’s army has been training paratroopers to ride motorcycles into battle, to avoid strikes.
Warfare has gone in unexpected directions in Ukraine. The modern technological leaps have contrasted with both sides also using centuries-old methods of trench warfare, mines and barbed wire.
War quickly finds out vulnerabilities and duds. In Afghanistan, the $100,000 Excalibur artillery round was secretly tagged as a weapon to defeat the Taliban, such was its alleged precision-guided GPS accuracy. But in Ukraine it was found to have only 50 per cent accuracy which dropped to 10 per cent due to jamming.
IISS think tank
“Ukraine literally stopped using them. A sophisticated, expensive shell that misses is worse than a cheap one,” said Arsenii Hurtavtsov, the director of a drone start-up company, who advised Ukraine on military purchasing.
The mass use of first-person view (FPV) quadcopter drones fitted with explosives has become so widespread and effective against vehicles and troops that the Russians have been forced to adapt as they try to seize more Ukrainian territory.
They are using hundreds of motorcycles and quadbikes to get through what has been called the “dead zone” – the last 10 to 15km before the frontline, dominated by surveillance drones that guide kamikaze weapons on to target.
To avoid the aerial hunters, elite soldiers from Russia’s 299th VDV airborne regiment are now training on motorbikes in anticipation of a substantial summer assault.
Trundling tanks
It is some distance from the original 2022 invasion force of conventional tanks, trucks, helicopters and fighter jets, nearly all of which have now been banished from the immediate combat zone.
At the start it was Turkish Bayraktar drones that had proven to be successful in the Armenia-Azerbaijan war and in Libya, alongside western anti-tank missiles, that held the line. Ukraine largely kept Russian armour at bay with its often crowd-funded flotilla of drones.
But after losing almost their entire stockpile of modern and antiquated vehicles, estimated at 10,000 tanks and 22,000 armoured troop carriers, Russian soldiers adapted by fitting metal cages on turrets to defend against drones.
That worked to a point but as the tank supplies ran out, troops were forced into vans and cars. Grim video footage of FPV drones chasing vehicles, which could not evade them even after shuddering U-turns, and increasing casualties have led to more radical methods.
Para-bikers
Russia is content to publicise these, with its Ministry of Defence releasing video footage of airborne troops driving on a customised, off-road motorbike course amid explosions.
The footage indicated that Russia was “developing a tactical doctrine for systematic offensive motorcycle usage”, the Institute for Study of War think tank said.
The tactic has been used since March, with one Ukrainian soldier reporting 13 motorcycle assaults on the besieged town of Pokrovsk.
With Russia struggling to operate heavy armoured vehicles near the frontline, Moscow was now using “the speed, manoeuvrability and small profiles of motorcycles” to “offset Ukrainian technological adaptations and drone operations", ISW reported.
The battlefield ingenuity was a constant evolution, said former British army officer Brig Ben Barry, of the IISS think tank.
“Both sides are constantly seeking an advantage over the other, so you get an action-reaction dynamic happening rapidly, and sometimes of considerable complexity,” he said. “It’s something that we saw in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.”
Death zone duels
The tactical evolution was necessary, said Nick Reynolds, a warfare expert at the Rusi think tank, because the 15km “death zone” contained surveillance drones that were able to direct accurate artillery fire or killer drones to lethal effect.
“Anything slow and sluggish that is approaching is going through what the Russians and Ukrainians are now calling the dead zone,” from the rear to the front.
“They are very vulnerable so motorbikes are ideal to cross the dead zone quickly, being small, light and relatively cheap,” Mr Reynolds said. “They also present multiple targets that therefore require multiple munitions, so it's partly about dispersion and partly about speed.”
The motorcycles' loud engine noise was not entirely relevant as Ukraine search drones would almost certainly have eyes on them from about 4km out, with the bikes probably parked before they can be heard a short distance from the front. Conversely, a disadvantage for the rider is the machine’s noise masking a drone’s approach.
But a recent Russian advance during a motorised assault near the village of Bahatyr was comprised entirely of motorcycles and civilian vehicles, but Ukrainian forces reportedly destroyed 15 of 18 motorcycles and damaged nine of the other 10 vehicles.
Cluster weapons
There has also been a humiliating list of failures for both sides, including advanced western missiles falling victim to electronic jamming.
Mr Hurtavtsov also highlighted the Himars precision missiles that the Russians countered with electronic jamming that threw them 15 metres off course or used air defence missiles to shoot down. “An expensive missile that hits water instead of a pontoon bridge is just expensive splashing,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
But that raises the potency of cluster munitions – banned by 124 countries under the 2008 Oslo convention – with a spread of bomblets across a wide area, which have at times proved devastating.
A recent paper by Rusi stated that the bombs were “highly effective” against radar and electronic warfare systems, and that armies lacking firepower “should probably prioritise cluster munitions for its artillery”.
While the western-made Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb, a 100kg gliding munition, has also been abandoned mainly due to Russian jamming, Moscow’s own much more basic answer has caused devastation on frontline position and in cities.
Realising that they had a massive stockpile of “dumb” munitions, the Russians adapted them by adding fold-out wings and satellite navigation to their FAB 500kg bombs, that are released by jets about 60km behind the front lines.
Quality in quantity
What Russia has also relearnt, although it is something embedded in its military’s Second World War psyche, is that mass matters or, as western officers quip, “there is a quality in quantity”.
Quantity has been most evident in the huge numbers of troops that Moscow is willing to sacrifice – perhaps as many as 200,000 dead and up to 800,000 wounded since 2022 – in pursuit of strategic gain.
Despite the losses, by far its worst since the Second World War, Russia is not only getting its numbers to pre-2022 levels of 700,000 but has “worked to restore the combat readiness of its operational forces", the Estonian foreign intelligence service wrote in a recent report.
“By 2026, the Kremlin aims to expand its military to 1.5 million soldiers, with presumably the lost armour being replaced by a defence industry working flat-out,” it said.
The Estonians also note that Russia is “committed to advancing drone technology and integrating drones extensively into its armed forces”.
Western bikers
Western armies have taken note, especially with Ukraine’s ability to build drones in mass, perhaps five million this year. By comparison, Taiwan is trying to increase its kamikaze drone stockpile by 15,000 a month by 2028, to deter China.
Special forces in America and Britain are developing tactics using fast, off-road vehicles such as the Polaris MRZR to avoid drones.
“Western forces have been doing this and coming to the same conclusions – that drones are now a prevailing threat,” said Mr Reynolds.
Brig Barry suggested that with special forces, “there's a lot of active experimentation going on, not all of which is in the public”.
He agreed that the innovations had had a revolutionary effect on fighting wars. “But in regards to drones, I don't think the story is over," he said, adding: “There's a lot of people closely watching the lessons from Ukraine”.
