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Of all the realities that war in Ukraine is showing us, there is one that has no discussion: drones are The Trojan horse on which they are going to sustain war conflicts From now on. In Eastern Europe we are Seeing scenarios that until recently they were more typical of Fantastic literature than reality. The prominence is such that the battle between soldiers is no longer getting rid of the ground. It is getting rid underground. The war in the bowels. Yes, Kharkiv’s front is being the scene of an unexpected phenomenon: Russian soldiers tried infiltrate pipes of gas and water, crawling through ducts Underground to overcome the Oskil River and establish positions closer to Kupiansk. It’s about The third time in which this tactic appears since the beginning of the invasion, and is a new defensive challenge for Ukrainian forces, which have reacted flooding, damaging and fortifying several of these passages, aware that the pipes form an extensive and difficult network to control. kyiv’s General Staff officially confirmed that the pipes had been used, although it stressed that the city remains under Ukrainian control and that most accesses have already been closely neutralized or monitored. Pipes such as espionage routes. Kupiank’s case is not isolated. As We count thenlast March, Russian special forces toured almost fifteen kilometers through a gas pipeline in Sudzha to throw a blow against the Ukrainian rear in Kursk, an episode that Moscow celebrated As tactical successalthough it ended with the annihilation of much of the infiltrated team. In Avdiivka, at the beginning of 2024, Russian troops They drained a pipe Water service and adapted it as a underground route, opening exits every hundred meters to facilitate the advance. These maneuvers, which evoke command operations of other warsThey take advantage of the industrial and energy fabric of Ukraine, a country crossed by large gas pipelines that for decades were key to the European supply of Russian gas and that today, to a large extent, are underutilized. The Ukrainian response. Before this Unusual threatUkraine has deployed measures from Creative Military Engineering. In Kupiansk, teams of the 429th regiment of unmanned systems used explosives to damage the point where a pipe crossed with the Oskil, causing its flood. In addition, wire wire have been introduced inside some ducts, with Videos that show Booby-Traped passages designed to catch or dissuade intruders. Although the controls They recognize that Russia could try to repair or reuse these passages, ensure that surveillance is constant and that each attempt will be answered. This deployment reflects how Ukrainian defense is not only fought on the surface, with drones, armored or artillery, but also a subsoil turned into a new front. The expansion underground. Plus: The war in Ukraine had already shown An underground face in the catacombs of Mariupol or in the trenches of Bajmut, but the use of gas pipelines and pipes A different dimension: abandoned industrial corridors that now become improvised military tunnels in fear that drones do not allow surface advances. With a diameter of more than one meter in some cases, they allow the passage of equipped men and even basic supplies. Its extension, designed to transport up to 140,000 million cubic meters of gas per year, constitutes a potential battlefield which multiplies the possibilities of infiltration and forces Ukraine to allocate resources to unexpected land. The paradox is evident: the same infrastructure that once connected Europe with Russian energy today are Combat scenarios where the immediate security of cities and defensive positions is played. Strategic implications. He Use of pipes as penetration routes Confirm two things. On the one hand, that drones have transformed What we understood as a contest so far. On the other, the Russian ability to exploit any loophole in Ukrainian geography, even undergroundtogether with the need for kyiv to develop multilayer defenses that cover from the sky, saturated with drones, to subsoils, now traveled by soldiers crawling into the dark. Beyond the punctual efficacy, These tactics They highlight the plasticity of contemporary war, where each civil infrastructure can be militarized and where combat is fought in secondary dimensions. For military analysts, the battle of pipes in Ukraine anticipates a future in which the defense of a country will depend both on the surface that its population inhabits, plagued with swarms, as well as on the bowels that run through its industrial networks, now turned into unexpected war tunnels. Image | SERGEY KOLYASNIKOV In Xataka | In the Norwegian cold war he devised a plan underground to detain the Soviet. Invasion to Ukraine has reactivated it In Xataka | Russia has crowded a surprising blow to Ukraine: 100 soldiers walking for four days inside a gas pipeline