Ukraine’s war effort relies on old pickup trucks

KYIV — Donald Trump may want Europeans to buy more American cars and trucks, but there's one market where buyers are much keener on Asian imports — the battlefronts of Ukraine.

Kyiv's all-out defensive war against Russia is forcing the country's soldiers to rely less on heavy armored vehicles and more on civilian pickup trucks. And the trucks they favor tend to be tough vehicles like the Toyota Hilux, the Nissan Navara (which ended European production in 2021) and especially the Mitsubishi L200, also discontinued four years ago.

“I would say the L200 is the best of them all, objectively, even despite the grim 200 in its name,” said Andriy Ivanov, commander of the Evil Peregrine Unmanned Systems Battalion. (Cargo 200 is Soviet military jargon for transporting dead soldiers.) “Despite the name, that car has saved many lives,” Ivanov said.

By contrast, American trucks need parts that can be hard for Ukrainian workshops to obtain — making them far less popular with the troops.

"Once we had to wait for 30 days just to get one crucial bolt delivered to Ukraine. The U.S. is so far away," said Ruslan Andriuk, executive manager at Nesemos Veteran Auto Hub — an outfit that employs military veterans to repair vehicles meant for frontline troops.

The use of non-military trucks is becoming a hallmark of the war.

“Cars are everything! It’s the way you resupply weapons to the positions; it’s how you evacuate the wounded from encirclement.  Mobile air defense units use civilian pickup trucks when chasing Russian drones,” Andriuk said.

“You can transport up to 10 people, depending on the pickup model. And it's way easier to repair them. They are lighter than armored vehicles and easier to evacuate from in case of an attack,” he added.

Russia has adopted a similar policy, with its invading troops often relying on private vehicles and even motorbikes to swiftly navigate the front lines while avoiding the clouds of Ukrainian drones that quickly zoom in on tanks and armored personnel carriers.

In the first two years of the war, Ukraine imported more than 100,000 mostly used cars for soldiers, forcing the government to slash red tape for vehicle registrations and to classify them as humanitarian aid.

“Nowadays it’s mostly the U.K., maybe Norway. We drained all the used car markets in Poland in the first months of 2022,” said Mariia Ksondzyk, CEO of Nesemos. “But it’s better to hunt for those trucks among farmers in the U.K.”

In addition to imports, Ukrainians have donated more than 3,000 vehicles for the needs of the armed forces since February 2022, said Mykola Rudyk, head of the main service center of the Ukraine interior ministry.

About 95 percent of the cars used by the Ukrainian army are supplied by volunteers and are largely sourced from the European Union and the U.K., as well as from the Middle East.

And it's not just Ukrainians. One Polish national, Mateusz "Exen" Wodziński, says he has supplied 323 used trucks to Ukrainian troops since the war began.

Ukrainian soldiers call the cars korch (cramp, as in a painful muscle) due to how much the vehicles endure on the war front, contending with extreme off-road conditions, night chases and even drone attacks.

Soldiers frequently have to pay for repairs with their own or donated money.

Healing the wheels

Before launching Nesemos in 2023, Ksondzyk and her team, just like hundreds of other Ukrainian and EU volunteers, had hunted for off-road cars all around Europe. So far they have delivered more than 250 trucks.

It's not just a question of delivering the vehicles to frontline units, however. The brutal conditions mean they need repair and maintenance, services that are difficult to access on the battlefield. Civilian garages, too, are often stumped by how to fix war-related defects — which is how Nesemos Auto Hub was born.

“Once soldiers brought a Ford to us that wasn't moving, and they couldn't figure out why. It emerged that they fueled it with gasoline mixed with water. As soon as we cleared the car and fueled it with normal gas, it was ready to go,” Andriuk recalled.

Nesemos has already repaired more than 500 trucks.

“The European market is more popular in Ukraine, because it's easier and faster for us to find parts,” Andriuk said. “Sometimes Ukrainian soldiers need their car fixed within 24 hours to go on a mission."

A truck’s lifespan in Ukraine depends on good maintenance, the missions it is used for, and above all — pure luck.

“Let’s be honest, today all the logistical routes along the contact line look like a lunar landscape. So you don't even need an FPV drone attack to lose a wheel there, together with all the levers, rods and stabilizers,” Ivanov said. “It's impossible to get used to the holes, which appear on the road in three new places every day. We drive mostly in the dark. This increases the risks of getting hit.”

Ukraine’s war trucks are frequently targeted by guided bombs, FPV drones and artillery. “Cars burn, break down every day. They are a consumable material, as it were. Everything that moves, everything that has more than a human signature, is a priority target,” Ivanov said.

Financing repairs

Ivanov’s unit, like many others in the Ukrainian army, has its own truck repair service and spends up to 200,000 hryvnia (€4,600) per month on maintenance.

Nesemos volunteers help fix vehicles when soldiers can't finance the repairs on their own. In additional to collecting donations to patch up war trucks, the Veteran Auto Hub also repairs civilian vehicles, and uses the earnings to subsidize its services to the military.

“Thanks to civilians, we can afford to do car service work for a military unit,” Ksondzyk said.  “We frequently have military units where there are 200 cars on balance, but only 10 of them work. It takes a lot of time and bureaucracy to get the state to finance the costly repairs. And time is everything at the war front.”