The publication recalls that the last case of using pipelines occurred in the area of Kupyansk, a key railway junction located about 120 km southeast of Kharkov. Ukrainian troops in response flooded sections of pipelines or surrounded them with barbed wire. The General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces said that the output of the pipeline in Kupyansk is under the control of the Kyiv troops and does not lead to the city center.
The use of Soviet gas infrastructure as a means of moving is the last innovation in the exhausting attempts of Moscow to seize the territory along the front line, the article says. Often this is a physically difficult task for the invaders who were nicknamed “pipeline troops,” writes Bloomberg. The aggressor country has not officially recognized the use of this tactics.
The practice of placing troops in underground communications was applied in the capture of Avdeevka in the Donetsk region in February 2024 by Russia. In that case, the sewer channel was used. Since then, Russia has studied and improved the experience of using pipelines in combat conditions, the article says. In particular, the Russians developed motorized trolleys to move through pipes. Particular attention was paid to this during the operation in the Kursk region in the west of Russia, which Ukrainian troops captured last year during the cross -border raid and held more than seven months.
Context
Thousands of kilometers of the Russian-Ukrainian pipeline system form an extensive network, which once provided most of the export of Russian gas to Europe, the publication notes. Transit was completely stopped in January 2025 after the expiration of the long -standing contract. Kyiv refused to extend him in order to block the receipts that are going to finance a full -scale Russian invasion.
