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Before last week, the idea that Ukraine could turn the tables and seize territory from its much more powerful neighbor, Russia, would have seemed unthinkable to most observers.
After Ukrainian troops invaded Russia’s Kursk region on August 6, panic quickly spread among local Russian residents, despite authorities repeatedly assuring them that everything was under control.
Hours before Ukrainian soldiers stormed Russia’s western border, Moscow saw no signs of anything unusual.
The raid raised questions about the effectiveness of Russian surveillance and the strength of its border fortifications and guarding forces.
“Russia’s intelligence work has completely failed,” Yohann Michel, a French military expert and researcher at the IESD Institute in Lyon, said in an interview.
Michel said that as Ukrainian troops retreat to eastern Ukraine, one of the most strategic areas on the front line, Moscow is likely to believe that Kiev will not take a high-risk gamble that even now is far from clear will pay off.
“If it’s hard for the Russians to imagine something this big happening, I can understand that,” he said.
Warnings ignored
Andrei Gurulyov, a Russian lawmaker and former military officer, said in a television interview two days after the incursion that Russia’s military leadership had been warned in a report a month earlier that there were signs Ukraine was preparing for an attack but ignored it.
It was not until the following afternoon, August 7, that President Vladimir Putin and his armed forces chief of general staff, Valery Gerasimov, spoke publicly for the first time about the Kursk incident, which the Kremlin leaders called “another major provocation” by Ukraine.
Gerasimov told Putin in a televised address that Russian forces had “prevented” up to 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers from advancing deep into the Kursk region.
Military analyst Michel said it was unclear whether Gerasimov was misled by his subordinates or felt the need to deliver good news to Putin in front of television cameras.
‘We advise people to leave’
It took nearly 12 hours from the time the invasion took place (Gerasimov said it happened at 5:30 a.m. on August 6) to the time the Defense Department publicly acknowledged that Ukraine had attacked the border (let alone breached it).
Alexey Smirnov, acting Kursk regional governor only months into his job, has been tasked with filling the communications gap and trying to coordinate with the multiple defense and security agencies responsible for protecting the border.
Regions on both sides of the border are accustomed to tit-for-tat missile and drone attacks. But the attacks in the Kursk region, which Smirnov documented in Telegram posts, have been more sustained than usual over the past 10 days.
Alarms began to circulate on social media from around 5 a.m., with locals posting that shelling in the Russian border town of Souja had been going on for three hours.
A series of posts appeared on the community channel “Native Sudzha” on the social network VKontakte. One post at 7:34 a.m. read: “We advise people to leave the town,” and warned people to be on the lookout for drones and unexploded shells.
At 8:15 a.m., locals in Sudzha reported that “heavy fighting was taking place on the border itself.” But a widely read Russian war blog disagreed.
“Everything is under control”
Just after 10 a.m., Governor Smirnov confirmed for the first time that Ukraine had attempted an invasion but said Russian soldiers and FSB border guards had “prevented” the border from being breached.
This was the first of many claims that were quickly disproven by the facts.
Before noon, the Russian Defense Ministry released a video of Gerasimov inspecting Russia’s frontline positions in Ukraine, but remained silent on the Kursk incident.
In the Kremlin, too, the spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, was on summer vacation, and reporters were not given their usual daily briefings. As of August 16, 10 days later, he had not returned to work.
“Please tell me, did Ukrainian tanks really break through Sudja and Darino?” user “Nestik” posted on Telegram.
Smirnov posted that help was being provided to residents in areas hit by missiles and drones overnight. “The situation is under control,” he wrote at 12:46 p.m.
About an hour later, Russian news agencies published the first central government report on the situation, which came from the Russian Federal Security Service, saying Russia had “repelled an armed provocation.”
However, by this time, residents had already begun to leave in large numbers. A woman named Anna said on Telegram that residents of Souja “are leaving in large numbers.”
“Of course. Everyone wants to survive,” someone answered.
In the chaos, some people were left behind. Search network Liza Alert said it had issued more than 100 “missing” notices looking for people who had gone missing since August 6, including many retired people in their 70s and 80s.
Dragon Tooth
Smirnov’s predecessor as governor, Roman Starovoit, has repeatedly told the public that Russia has strengthened border defenses in the Kursk region.
In December 2022, he posed in the snow with a pyramid-shaped “Dragon’s Tooth” anti-tank defense position. The following month, he wrote: “At present, the risk of an invasion of the Kursk region by Ukrainian forces is not high.”
However, last fall, Ukraine’s National Resistance Center, created by special forces, said in an online post that reconnaissance showed “almost all points are empty and their equipment is abandoned” along the Kursk border, and said corruption was a factor.
Video posted by Ukrainian paratroopers showed columns of armored vehicles pouring in through rows of dragon-tooth-shaped fortifications, part of Kursk’s defenses that Russian media reported cost 15 billion rubles ($168 million).
Pasi Paroinen, an analyst at Finland’s Blackbird Group, said the video appeared to show minesweeper explosives clearing a path through a minefield, bulldozer shovels on armored vehicles clearing a path through the “Dragon’s Teeth,” and bridging vehicles crossing ditches and creeks.
“It’s clear that they prepared and used a lot of different types of engineering equipment,” said Paroinen, who has studied public footage of the Russian-Ukrainian war.
Brady Africk, a U.S. analyst who maps Russian defenses, said the Kursk region has fewer anti-vehicle trenches, obstacles and fighting positions than Russian positions in occupied southern Ukraine, where a Ukrainian army counteroffensive stalled last summer.
“It would likely be easier for Ukrainian forces to bypass and move through Russian defenses in the region, especially if those defenses are less well-manned or poorly trained,” he said.
Shared responsibility
Responsibility for protecting Russia’s borders is shared between regular troops, FSB border troops, and the National Guard. Governor Smirnov said on the afternoon of the first day that he had met with “representatives of the security agencies,” an apparent reference to these various agencies.
He has reversed his initial statement that they had prevented a border breach. “The situation in the border region remains difficult, but our defenders are successfully neutralizing the enemy,” Smirnov said.
At 5:05 p.m., the Defense Department made its first mention of the incursion and said Russia had moved its reserves to the region.
“The operation will end with the complete defeat of the enemy and the arrival of (Russian troops) at the border,” Gerasimov told Putin at an August 7 briefing.
Ten days later, more than 100,000 Russians have been displaced and Ukraine claims control of more than 1,000 square kilometers of territory in the Kursk region, but Moscow’s troops are still far from achieving that goal.
(Editing by Georgi Gotev)
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