Kursk Ambush: Did Russia Pull Off Another Pipeline Sneak Attack On Ukrainian Troops?

Dozens, possibly scores, of Russian soldiers, some wearing oxygen masks, shuffled secretly through water and methane fumes for days, moving kilometers through an unused underground gas pipeline into Sudzha, a town in Russia's southern Kursk region.

Kursk was invaded last August by Ukrainian forces, embarrassing the Kremlin. Struggling to uproot them, Russian commanders enlisted thousands of North Korean soldiers to throw into the fight.

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Sometime around March 8, an unknown number of Russian soldiers emerged from the pipeline somewhere on Sudzha’s outskirts and were engaged by Ukrainian troops -- possibly by surprise. Ukrainian command confirmed an attempted incursion but claimed it had been thwarted.

In the days that followed, Ukrainian troops lost substantial territory in Kursk, in some places a sudden withdrawal. On March 13, Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed control of Sudzha.

The exact details of the pipeline operation -- and whether it triggered Ukraine’s abrupt shift in fortunes in Kursk -- remain unclear.

But if confirmed, the operation would be the second time in just over a year that Russia has pulled off this sort of cunning ambush to undermine Ukrainian positions.

They 'Drove A Wedge Into Our Formations'

News of the pipeline incident first emerged from both Ukrainian and Russian bloggers, as well as official Ukrainian sources, on March 8.

“The Russians used a gas pipeline to move an assault company, undetected by drones, and drove a wedge into our formations,” Yuriy Butusov, a prominent Ukrainian war journalist with connections to the Ukrainian military, said in a Telegram post.

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While Russian TV channels claimed 800 Russian troops were involved, the newspaper Ukrainska Pravdaand other outlets said there were just 100 Russians and claimed that Ukrainian commanders had anticipated the effort.

Both Russian and Ukrainian media pointed to a branch of an underground pipeline that had ceased operation on January 1 and may have been as narrow as 1.4 meters in width in places.

One expletive-filled video posted on a Russian war blogger’s Telegram channel on March 9 showed a group of Russian soldiers seated, smoking cigarettes, in what appeared to be a pipeline. They complained about being in the pipe and said the group had already walked several kilometers toward Sudzha. The video could not be independently verified.

Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of Chechnya, also posted a video on March 12 appearing to show a unit of Russian and Chechen soldiers inside a pipeline. He said the group had walked as many as 15 kilometers underground.

Another widely read Russian war blogger suggested that the operation may not have gone as planned, saying that the unit had oxygen tanks, water, food, and radio -- but that some of the soldiers may have suffocated.

'Wholly Plausible'

Ukraine’s General Staff said on March 8 that the operation had been thwarted.

“The enemy forces were detected in time by the aerial reconnaissance units of the Airborne Assault Forces,”it said.

Ukrainian commentators said it was wholly plausible that Russian planners had identified the gas pipeline as a weakness.

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“If the Russian Federation finds engineering structures in locations where combat operations are taking place, it will use them 100 percent,” Ivan Stupak, a Ukrainian military analyst, told RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service.

“Of course, we can use it too. However, we need to have access to maps and technical documentation,” Stupak added. “I am sure that the Russian Federation is currently using Soviet archives for such operations.”

The last time Russian troops are known to have pulled off such a feat occurred more than a year ago, during the battle for the Donetsk region city of Avdiyivka in eastern Ukraine.

Russian troops had spent months trying to outflank Ukrainian defenses. Sometime in early January 2024, Russian sappers and other troops used a partially flooded water outflow tunnel to creep into a wooded southeastern corner of the city, where a tourist site used to sit.

Ukrainian forces were ambushed and struggled to repel the attack. About six weeks after the reported pipeline incursion, on February 17, 2024, Ukrainian commanders announced a retreat from the city to avoid encirclement.

As with Sudzha, it was unclear how much of a role last year’s ambush played in undermining Ukraine’s defenses in Avdiyivka.

It certainly didn’t help.