From: Transform Ukraine By Douglas Landro / September 14, 2025
A day when soldiers crawled through gas pipes, princes visited war zones, and nations scrambled jets over drone-filled skies
The Story of a Single Day
On September 13, 2025, the war in Ukraine revealed its strangest and most far-reaching character yet. Russian soldiers emerged from gas pipelines like something from a spy thriller. A British prince stood in a missile-damaged government building discussing veteran recovery. Fighter jets from five nations scrambled across Eastern Europe as mysterious drones crossed borders. And deep in Russia, oil refineries burst into flames from Ukrainian drones that had traveled farther than most people drive on vacation.
This was the 933rd day of a war that had started with tanks rolling across borders and evolved into something unrecognizable—a conflict fought in underground tunnels and cyberspace, in financial markets and diplomatic conferences, with weapons that didn’t exist when the fighting began.
Four Days in the Dark: The Pipeline Soldiers
Imagine crawling through a gas pipeline for four days straight. Not walking, not even crouching—crawling. In complete darkness, using electric scooters and wheeled stretchers to move through a tube barely wide enough for a human body. This is what Russian soldiers did to reach the Ukrainian city of Kupyansk, emerging like phantoms from underground after a journey that took them 100 hours to complete.
The operation began in the occupied village of Lyman Pershyi, where Russian troops entered the pipeline from a wooded area. They traveled eight kilometers beneath the Oskil River, emerging near Radkivka on Kupyansk’s outskirts. From there, they dispersed into the city itself, setting up drone control positions while Ukrainian forces scrambled to figure out how enemy soldiers had appeared behind their lines.
This wasn’t the first time Russian forces had tried this underground approach. They’d done it twice before—in Avdiivka and Sudzha—but now the tactic was spreading to different units across the front. It was like a deadly game of Telephone, where instead of whispered messages, armies were sharing techniques for infiltrating enemy territory through buried infrastructure.
Ukrainian forces eventually discovered the infiltration route and damaged the pipeline, trapping any remaining Russians inside. Their counter-operations killed 395 Russian personnel, including 288 confirmed dead. But the psychological impact lingered: if soldiers could emerge from underground pipes, where else might they appear?
The pipeline crawlers represented something new in warfare—the complete adaptation to an environment where drones ruled the sky and every movement above ground risked detection. The war had literally gone underground.
When Drones Cross the Line: NATO’s Wake-Up Call
At precisely the moment Romanian air traffic controllers lost the signal from a Russian drone 20 kilometers southwest of Chilia Veche village, something irreversible happened. The small aircraft had crossed from Ukrainian airspace into NATO territory, and in doing so, triggered the largest coordinated military response along Europe’s eastern frontier since the war began.
Within hours, Romanian F-16s were airborne, Polish airports were closing, and French transport planes were landing in Poland carrying weapons for Rafale fighter jets. What started as a single drone violation had become Operation Eastern Sentry—NATO’s answer to Russia’s escalating provocations.
The September 10 incident that triggered this response was unprecedented: at least 19 Russian drones had penetrated Polish airspace in a single night. Polish F-16s engaged Russian military assets for the first time since 2022, shooting down several drones with Sidewinder missiles that cost $400,000 each. It was an expensive way to swat flies, but these were flies that could explode.
The alliance’s response was swift and overwhelming. Czech helicopters, Danish F-16s and naval frigates, French Rafales, and German Eurofighters—a multinational force that would have seemed impossible to coordinate just months earlier. Even Britain, still smarting from Brexit complications, pledged support.
Estonia, sensing the changing winds, quietly implemented its own precautions. The Baltic nation banned flights along its eastern border during nighttime hours, when most drone activity occurred. It was a small measure, but it spoke to a larger truth: the war was no longer contained to Ukraine. The entire region was adapting to a new reality where aerial vehicles could appear anywhere, at any time.
The irony wasn’t lost on military planners. Russia’s attempt to intimidate NATO through drone incursions had achieved exactly the opposite—the alliance was now more present and more coordinated along its eastern flank than at any time since the Cold War.
The President’s Empty Threat: Trump’s Calculated Bluff
Donald Trump’s social media post on September 13 read like a masterclass in diplomatic theater: “I am ready to do major sanctions on Russia when all NATO nations have agreed, and started, to do the same thing, and when all NATO nations stop buying Russian oil.”
The statement sounded tough, decisive, presidential. It was also a carefully crafted escape hatch that Trump knew would never close. By conditioning his sanctions threat on unanimous NATO compliance—including Hungary and Slovakia’s abandonment of Russian energy—Trump had essentially guaranteed he would never have to follow through. It was political genius disguised as righteous indignation.
Viktor Orbán’s Hungary had built its entire energy strategy around Russian gas, constructing pipelines and signing long-term contracts that made immediate diversification economically catastrophic. Slovakia faced similar constraints, with Russian energy flowing through the Druzhba pipeline representing not just economic necessity but political leverage that Moscow had cultivated for decades. Trump’s advisors certainly knew this. The president almost certainly knew this.
The beauty of Trump’s gambit was its superficial reasonableness. Who could argue against demanding that allies stop funding the enemy before America imposed its own costly measures? The position allowed Trump to claim moral high ground while knowing that Hungary and Slovakia’s energy dependence made compliance impossible—at least in any timeframe that mattered for current events.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s simultaneous equivocation about Russian drone incursions provided another layer of diplomatic cover. While Trump threatened sanctions, Rubio publicly questioned whether Russian violations of Polish airspace were intentional, suggesting the administration remained reluctant to escalate confrontation with Moscow.
“The drones were intentionally launched,” Rubio told reporters, “but the question is whether the drones were targeted to go into Poland specifically.” It was a distinction that infuriated European allies who saw obvious Russian provocation, but it served American interests in maintaining plausible deniability about escalation.
The entire performance reflected Trump’s approach to international relations: appear strong while avoiding commitments, demand action from others while preserving flexibility for yourself, and above all, never paint yourself into a corner where you might have to damage relationships with useful partners—even adversarial ones.
For European observers, the calculation was transparent and troubling. Trump’s “friend” Putin could continue receiving revenue from European energy purchases while America avoided the economic and diplomatic costs of comprehensive sanctions. It was burden-shifting dressed up as leadership, leaving Europeans to choose between energy security and alliance solidarity while America preserved its options.
From Weapons Recipients to Arms Dealers: Ukraine’s Technological Revolution
Keith Kellogg’s admission at the Yalta European Strategy conference in Kyiv was remarkable for an American military official: “We in the United States are behind. I think a lot of nations are behind, and I think to the credit of the Ukrainians, they picked up on that, and they’re the world leaders in it.”
He was talking about drone technology, but he might as well have been describing the complete transformation of Ukraine’s relationship with the world. Two and a half years ago, Ukraine had been pleading for basic weapons to defend itself. Now American officials were acknowledging Ukrainian technological superiority and discussing contracts worth $30 billion.
Voice of Ukraine 