Despite Ukraine and Russia agreeing to a 30-day halt on strikes on energy infrastructure to advance negotiations to end the war, Ukrainian troops hit the Russian Sudzha gas metering station on the border between the two countries.
The fire broke out at night on 21 March. The blaze was so strong that the flame on the border of Kursk and Sumy regions could be seen from the city of Kursk, although the distance was about 90 kilometres.
[It] burns very badly.
The largest corridor of Russian gas supplies to Europe passed through that gas metering station. In May 2022, Ukraine stopped accepting gas for transit through Sohranivka, after which Sudzha remained the only gas metering station through which supplies continued.
However, experts argue that it was Ukrainian gas that caught fire, as Russian troops siphoned gas from their side earlier in order to carry out Operation Pipeline and get behind Ukrainian troops in Sudzha, which allowed the Russian military to capture the town.
Russia blamed the Ukrainian army for shelling the Sudzha gas metering station. However, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) said that Russia shelled its own station. Russian officials described the strike and the subsequent Ukrainian statement as a provocation aimed at disrupting the agreements and a future peace treaty.
Earlier, on the night of 19 March, the AFU carried out a drone strike on the Russian Kavkazskaya oil transfer facility in Krasnodar region, which Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova described as a provocation and Ukraine’s refusal to settle the conflict peacefully.
The AFU struck the Sudzha gas metering station despite the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had agreed the day before to stop strikes on Russian energy facilities. A similar decision was made by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, who ordered Russian troops to shoot down drones on their way to Ukraine’s facilities.
