On patrol with Skala, whose fearless motorbike assaults have gained Ukraine valuable ground against Russia — but has it come at too high a cost?
Maxim Tucker
October 3, 2025
The Times
Smoke billowed across a field as four dirt bikes roared across it, each ridden by a pair of Ukrainian soldiers. Reaching a treeline, they slid the bikes on to their sides, dismounted and advanced with rifles raised.
In a nearby gully, more motorbikes appeared, soldiers firing from the pillion seat as they engaged targets on the move. These are the latest recruits of 425th Separate Assault Regiment, nicknamed Skala.
Patrick, the company sergeant major, drills his modern-day dragoons before they head into battle. He said: “You need real skill. It’s pulling up to enemy positions at high speed and hitting them before they know it. “Arrive at a speed of 100 kilometres an hour, jump into the tree line, blam-blam-blam — only bodies left. Mobility and surprise. The guys have already started working while the enemy are still sitting in a trench scratching their balls.”
Skala’s hard-charging nature has generated controversy. They have earned plaudits for succeeding in some of Ukraine’s toughest assault missions, but criticism for incurring heavy casualties in the process.
Today, they are fighting the Russians along the hottest points of the 800-mile frontline, at close quarters on the southern outskirts of Pokrovsk and counterattacking Kremlin forces in seven nearby villages.
The regiment recently received 12 Abrams tanks from Australia to complement its existing T-80s. It is also about to receive British M-777 howitzers to work alongside their American M109 and Soviet-era Gvozdika 2S1 artillery. The regiment, soon to become one of Ukraine’s most powerful, is also equipped with modern rifles.
At their regimental field headquarters, officers presided over multiple firefights, with live action from the battlefield relayed via screens and real-time maps.
“Murakha, Murakha — stay there. DO NOT GO OUTSIDE!” an officer shouted down the radio to a soldier he was guiding via drone feed. Static buzzed in return. “Everyday the same shit — this non-communication is f***ed up!” he complained.
Next door, an artillery commander watched a lone Russian soldier snaking his way through a field towards Ukrainian infantry, seemingly unaware he had been spotted. “We’re going to kill him now. We’ll hit him with artillery,” the officer said, before giving the command: “Minus zoom to one. On approach, 155 caliber.” The soldier disappeared in a puff of smoke.
On another screen, Skala’s drones hovered over the Krasnolymanska coal mine, where plumes of dust and smoke charted its infantry’s room-to-room fighting with Russians inside a building.
Outside headquarters a private Alex, 43, leant on a crutch by the medical aid station, smoking a cigarette. The flesh on his face was blackened by burns and pitted with lacerations from shrapnel. He had just been pulled out of the mine after 40 days of intense combat.
His four-man team cleared a large administrative building, killing at least four Russian soldiers, before taking up defensive positions. They held on for five weeks before Russian reinforcements flanked them, hitting their positions with grenades, he said. “We were thrown back about ten metres, all of us stunned. More Russians kept coming, they were right next to us. We had only one working rifle left between us and no communications. We regrouped in a smaller building and hid,” Alex said. “We waited for darkness and moved out. ‘Jeweller’ ran out first. He was hit immediately. I leant over to treat him and was hit several times in my [armoured] vest. Jeweller was dead, and the others told me ‘run!’”
Alex and other soldiers recovering from recent battles appear to be well-treated. Once they make it back to base, they have access to regular medical care, dentistry, physiotherapy, massages and even a sauna. “Director”, the regiment’s medical company commander, went to great lengths to show The Times the care that Skala’s fighting men receive, contradicting the controversial reputation that hampers its recruitment efforts.
Online, desperate relatives frequently post pleas for information about their missing relatives. “They second people to Skala from other brigades and that’s it. The guys don’t come back,” read a post by Nataliya Bulavkina, who told The Times that her brother was killed fighting for Skala. “Guys disappear,” said another post. A third said: “My nephew was training for a month and then immediately to Kursk!”
One soldier, taking a break from battle, acknowledged the scale of the regiment’s casualties. “Yes, a lot. I don’t even want to think about it.”
Skala’s commanders said that concerns about its casualty rate were overstated. ‘Nemo’, the regiment’s deputy commander, argued that some losses were inevitable given the vast scale of the war and were justified by Skala’s skill in capturing key positions.
“The parents of our brothers-in-arms — they might consider us guilty, but I don’t believe anyone in our unit is guilty of the death of any particular serviceman,” said Nemo. “If you analyse the statistics on completed combat missions — where we restored territory, where we retook settlements — and compare that to the motorised infantry brigades that lost them beforehand, they lost more people defending than we did retaking them.”
The motorbike attack tactic, adopted from Russian advances that have come at great cost, is also controversial, but Nemo said they had improved on Moscow’s tactics. “You can’t use a motorcycle company as a resource for any task, as the Russians are betting on — that’s nonsense,” he said. “But at night with a poncho that protects against thermal imaging, spread six bikes out on different routes — 12 men jumping into a position where they can dismount and take cover and from there start assault actions — then it can be effective.”
Back in the motorbike company, Patrick watched over his charges, seeing reminders of his fallen friends in every new soldier under his care, determined not to squander their lives. “I see them in the guys I train, the ones I’m constantly with — we eat from the same bowl, as they say, we sleep side by side,” he said. “They listen to you like little ducklings — to do this, go there. You worry about what he eats, what he drinks, whether he sleeps, whether someone guards his sleep. “You worry when you’re in combat directing him, telling him to hold, wait. You’ll never let him go where he will just end up getting killed.”
Maxim Tucker was Kyiv correspondent for The Times between 2014 and 2017 and is now an editor on the foreign desk. He has returned to report from the frontlines of the war in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February. He advises on grantmaking in the former Soviet countries for the Open Society Foundations and prior to that was Amnesty International’s Campaigner on Ukraine and the South Caucasus. He has also written for The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, Newsweek and Politico.