The New Subterranean Front

Photographs and videos by Sasha Maslov U kraine’s newest battlefield lies inside a network of steel pipes deep below the ground, some barely wide enough for a person to crawl through.

Before the war, these pipes carried natural gas from Russia to Ukraine.

Now soldiers zip through them on electric buggies, ambushing one another with machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades.

Most wars put soldiers through excruciating trials.

But even by the standards of brutality set more than a century ago in the mustard-gassed trenches of World War I, the fighting in Ukraine keeps plumbing new extremes.

At least 1 million troops—by some estimates, more than 2 million—have been killed or gravely wounded in this war, mostly by the drones that fill the skies above the battlefield, hunting anything that moves.

Over the past few years, the omnipresent drones have produced an effective stalemate at the front, which stretches for more than 700 miles across eastern and southern Ukraine.

Sasha Maslov A Ukrainian officer of the Khartiia Corps, Volodymyr Dehtyarov, rides through a pipeline on an electric buggy.

Aboveground, neither side has found a way to advance through what’s known as the kill zone—a new kind of no-man’s-land, dozens of miles wide, where drones can spot and attack any dugout, any vehicle, even a lonely soldier trudging through a field.

“Day by day, the kill zone is expanding, getting wider and deadlier,” Brigadier General Ihor Obolensky, who commands a force of several thousand Ukrainian troops, told me.

“So what’s the answer? You go underground.” There, at least, the drones cannot see you.

The Russians were first to figure this out, and they have pioneered a new approach to warfare, Obolensky said.

“Now we’re catching up.” Sasha Maslov Ukrainian soldiers stand at the entrance to one of the steel pipes now used for subterranean warfare.

These battles, which have not been previously reported in detail, mark a broader shift in the war.