Ukrainian troops spent month in underground tunnels sifting through barricade of Russian bodies to launch counterattack

Detailed summary

The Khartiia unit said 100 soldiers were killed and 30 captured as they attacked Russians from underground and above ground

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Soldiers fighting for Ukraine crawled through 15 kilometres of gas pipeline filled with corpses to launch a surprise attack on Russian troops in Kharkiv.

Volodymyr Zelensky had last month hailed the “stunning success” of the operation by the Khartiia corps, launched to prevent Russian troops slipping into the eastern city of Kupyansk.

Now, Kyiv has revealed that its troops spent as long as a month underground, battling through freezing water and sifting through the bodies of dead Russian soldiers that Moscow had built up as a barricade inside the long tunnels - before opening fire on a group of Russian soldiers.

"The Russians even used their own dead, those who died or perished inside the pipe, and stacked their bodies into this barricade like sandbags," recalls a Colombian volunteer with the callsign ‘Agijon’, who spent around one month underground.

Agijon was one of the troops, alongside his Colombian colleague with the callsign ‘Cuerbo’, who dragged Russian corpses away by hand as they sifted through the barricades of rubble and debris stretching as much as 200 metres long.

Some of the shortest members of Ukraine’s Khartiia corps had trained for weeks in pipes of a similar size, practising with gas masks and oxygen tanks, ahead of Operation Veles, the unit said.

They pair then heard Russian voices down the tunnel, and Cuerbo told his colleagues he would investigate, ordering his colleagues to stay behind.

Advancing alone for the most significant and risky push in the operation, stitching his armour so it did not snag in the pipe as he crawled forward around 50 metres in the tunnel, Khartiia said.

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