Gas transportation pipelines... a hidden front under the territory of Ukraine

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When movement over the ground became exposed to drones, soldiers found another route to their opponents' positions: gas pipelines buried under the battlefield.

In Ukraine, corridors that used to transport energy from Russia to Europe have turned into paths for infiltration and ambushes, within which fighters are waging a narrow war, far from the eyes of drones.

Within the network, soldiers move crawling or in small electric vehicles, exchanging machine gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades, while these confrontations reveal how technology has redrawn the front and pushed both sides to exploit infrastructure that has lost its original function, according to a field report by The Atlantic magazine.

Along the front, the spread of drones has made advancing across fields and trenches extremely dangerous, as these aircraft can spot vehicles, fortified positions, and even soldiers moving alone, within an area that the military has come to call the “killing zone.”

Ukrainian General Ihor Obolensky, who commands thousands of soldiers within the “Khartia” formation, says that this area is becoming larger and more deadly, adding: “So what is the solution? The solution is to go underground.” He acknowledges that the Russian forces were the first to exploit the pipes, while his forces are trying to catch up with them. He believes that control over the network may give Moscow an advantage in a winter attack that Ukrainian officials fear it is preparing.

The move to the depths goes beyond the movements of soldiers; Civilians took shelter, underground classrooms were built, and parts of the electricity grid and weapons factories were moved to fortified facilities, in an attempt to limit the effects of repeated bombings.

Obolensky's forces realized the extent of the threat in the spring of 2025, when Russian soldiers began to appear behind their positions and launch surprise attacks, sometimes taking advantage of the bad weather that made it difficult to spot them when out and about.

At first, the Ukrainians tried to identify the openings and attack the intruders as soon as they appeared, but they were emerging from other points kilometers away, prompting their commander to request network maps from the state energy company.

The maps revealed a complex network of at least 57 steel pipes under the war zone, most of them between one and two meters in diameter, and which had been used for decades to transport gas from Siberia to Ukraine and Europe.

After the transit of Russian gas through Ukraine stopped in early 2025, these corridors became available for a completely different use.

This tactic emerged during the battles for Russian forces to retake the city of Sodja in the Kursk region, which Ukrainian forces entered in August 2024. Then similar infiltration operations appeared inside Ukraine, including Pokrovsk and the vicinity of Kubyansk, according to Obolensky.

He says that the infiltrators would sometimes arrive singly or in pairs, and hide in abandoned buildings or holes under trees, waiting for a sufficient force to gather to carry out an ambush.

The difficulty of these operations is not limited to confronting the opponent; The crossing itself is a test of endurance. In an interview conducted by a Ukrainian blogger with two Russian prisoners, one of them said that he spent two days hunched inside a tube before emerging near a forest.

In late July, Obolensky entered the tubes himself, and emerged shaken by the cruelty of the experience. In recording his photos after his departure, he described the soldiers working there as heroes, saying that they did not resemble the warriors he had known before.