Chinese-made golf carts. Belarusian motorcycles. Lada compact cars, bukhanka vans and antique GAZ-69 trucks. Surplus electric scooters from Russia’s thriving scooter rental industry. At least one locomotive. As Russia’s stocks of armored fighting vehicles (AFVs) run low, Russian regiments and brigades in Ukraine are turning to civilian vehicles to transport troops into battle.
The most recent addition to this arsenal of ex-civilian vehicles, many of them up-armored with anti-drone cages, might be the most comical: a school bus.
On or just before Sunday, a Ukrainian drone operator spotted a yellow school bus parked near the front line in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, the locus of the fighting in the east.
The bus may have broken down. It may have gotten stuck while trying to go off-road on the soft terrain that’s typical of springtime Ukraine. At least one explosive first-person-view drone barreled in, striking the bus and lighting it ablaze.
As a battlefield transport, a bus is less than ideal. “Civilian vehicles are better than walking but will obviously not provide any protection or fire support” with vehicle-mounted guns, explained analyst Jakub Janovksy. “So assaults with them instead of proper AFVs will be more costly and more likely to fail. They are also unlikely to be able to cross trenches, razor wire and other anti-infantry obstacles.”
Low vehicle stocks
But the Russians have little choice. Verified Russian losses in the 39 months since Russia widened its war on Ukraine include 17,000 vehicles and other pieces of heavy equipment. That’s more vehicles than many armies have in their entire inventories—and more vehicles than Russia’s sanctions-squeezed weapons industry can produce in three years. Annual production of new tanks and infantry fighting vehicles in Russia might total 1,100.
The Kremlin has complemented its newly built vehicles with Cold War-vintage vehicles its technicians pulled from vast storage yards. But even these yards are depleted now. “A lot of what remains is in a terrible state,” Janovksy said.
Hence the golf carts, scooters and cars—and the bus.
The Donetsk war bus wasn’t the first-ever bus to go to war in recent years. Islamic State militants and their most fearsome opponents, the Kurdish Peshmerga, both modified civilian vehicles for combat use in the 2010s. The big difference between the ISIS and Pesh battle buses and Russia’s own battle bus is that the former usually wore a lot of add-on armor to protect them from enemy fire.
The Russians often add protection to their civilian assault vehicles, but there’s no evidence they gave the bus in Donetsk this treatment. Maybe there was no time. Maybe the engineers who fit cars and trucks with improvised armor weren’t ready to give a much bigger vehicle the same treatment.
Abandoned, immobile and totally lacking protection from the drones that are everywhere all the time over the front line in Ukraine, the Russian bus was an easy target.
