Ukraine's 2nd National Guard Corps, Khartiia, is modifying unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) to scout and fight inside underground gas pipelines, spaces too narrow for conventional military machinery.
The work is being done by the corps' Lava Unmanned Systems Regiment. It follows Operation Veles, in which Ukrainian soldiers advanced more than 15 kilometers through pipeline infrastructure near Kupiansk. The pipe was about 1.2 meters across. Khartiia says the operation killed more than 100 Russian soldiers and led to over 30 captures, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has given the same figures. Neither number has been independently verified.
Russia used the same pipeline network beneath the Oskil River to move troops toward Ukrainian-held ground, and the Ukrainian monitoring group DeepState reported an earlier infiltration attempt in September 2025. Veles turned that tactic around.
The robots are being adapted from existing ground vehicles rather than built as surface machines. They must fit the pipe and still carry out military tasks. Commercial underground equipment is made for construction, drilling and tunneling, so there is little off-the-shelf hardware to borrow. Khartiia says it is already developing several systems.
The case for robots comes from the soldiers' own experience. The account of the operation describes underground fighting as restricting visibility, complicating communications and leaving little room to maneuver. A machine that goes in first removes a person from that squeeze. The regiment's battalion commander, callsign Matematyk, said the work covers "a very long list of tasks" and called it a new class of technology.
The hard part is likely control. Russia's Shturm uncrewed assault vehicles repeatedly lost their command link during the Tsentr-2026 exercise, and that was above ground. It is not clear how Ukraine's pipeline robots will be controlled, or how far into a pipe they can go before the link becomes the limit.