After years of fighting raged across the fields and forests of Ukraine and up into the skies above them, a new front has opened up in the war: beneath the earth. The Ukrainian army has now taken the fight to the Russians in the network of disused underground gas pipelines and tunnels around the town of Kupiansk in Ukraine’s east, the New York Times reported at the end of October. For almost two weeks, the Ukrainian army has been showing Western media outlets the grim reality of its efforts to seize control of a gas pipeline that passes beneath the Oskil River and into this frontline city that the Russians have been fighting to capture.
Kyiv in October launched Operation Veles, which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week described as a “great success”. Throughout the campaign, specially trained and equipped Ukrainian soldiers advanced 15 kilometres along a gas pipeline with a diameter of just 1.2 meters to secure the tunnel’s entry. The president said that troops had also managed to “eliminate” around a hundred Russian soldiers and take more than 30 more prisoners during the fierce fighting that raged unseen in this underground battlefield.
Read moreUkraine’s Pavlohrad refuses to yield to Putin despite unrelenting bombardment Huseyn Aliyev, a specialist on the war in Ukraine at the University of Glasgow, said that the operation marked Ukraine’s adoption of tactics long practiced by Moscow. Will Kingston-Cox, a specialist in Russia and the Ukraine war at the International Team for the Study of Security (ITSS) Verona, said that Moscow had previously used these tunnels to slip past Ukraine’s defences. Watch moreTestimonies from Ukraine's Oleshky: Residents flee Russian-occupied city The Russian army has subsequently used this new tactic to retake Kursk from Ukrainian control, then in the Kupiansk region, where Ukrainians soldiers fought them for each foot of the pipeline tunneling through the earth.
Ryhor Nizhnikau, a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, said that these tactics were only made possible by the network of Soviet-era gas pipelines and other tunnels that once brought Russian natural gas across Ukraine into Europe. But the fact is that we do see this network being used much more intensively over the past year.” Nizhnikau said that these underground networks were also found in the Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk regions, as well as in parts of Zaporizhzhia. Gustav Gressel, a military analyst at Austria’s National Defence Academy, said that sewage and drainage pipes could also serve the same purpose in Ukraine’s cities.
Largely built when eastern Ukraine was one of the industrial heartlands of the Soviet Union, these networks of pipelines are no secret to military planners in Kyiv and Moscow. One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading. To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site.
Aliyev said that Ukrainian forces had initially tried to wait for Russian soldiers to surface from the tunnels in a grim game of whack-a-mole rather than take the fight underground. But the Russian victories in Avdiivka and Kursk forced Kyiv to reconsider. In September 2025, Russian independent investigative media outlet iStories hammered the point home further, revealing how Moscow was stockpiling ammunition and supplies to use the gas pipeline in the Kupiansk region for a larger-scale offensive.
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