Russia is scrambling to shore up its defenses more than a week into Ukraine’s shock, lightning attack across the border on the southern Kursk region.
US officials told CNN that Russia has diverted thousands of troops from occupied territory inside Ukraine to counter the threat. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has had to bring in conscripts, backpeddling on a promise he made not to use them on the frontline.
A sizeable trench has been dug across countryside near the town of Selektsionnyi, around 45 kilometers (about 28 miles) from the border, in Kursk, satellite imagery showed. Online job adverts for trench diggers have emerged. “Payment every week,” promised one.
Experts told CNN that Ukraine’s bold gambit to breach Russia’s border, planned in complete secrecy, had stunned even Kyiv’s closest allies, including the United States, shifting the playing field of a more than two-year-old war.
But after months on the backfoot, losing ground in grinding battles in their own territory, just how were the Ukrainians able to catch Moscow by surprise and penetrate the Russian homeland?
First: superb operational security. Nothing about the operation leaked. Based on videos from the ground and satellite imagery of their advance, the troop movements almost seemed like an exercise or a defensive reinforcement.
“[Ukraine has] demonstrated that they can pull off such a secretive and significant operation successfully, they can penetrate Russian territory so this is no longer the red line, and they … are still very much committed to fight for their country, that there is no such thing as war fatigue, and they’re willing to take these, in a way, extreme measures for the sake of defending their country,” Natia Seskuria, an associate fellow at the UK’s Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies (RUSI), told CNN.
The force was built up under cover of thick summer foliage along the rural roads of Sumy region, in northeast Ukraine. Experienced, battle-hardened units were brought up or diverted from other areas. Units such as the 82nd Air Assault Brigade, which had until recently been fighting in nearby Kharkiv region, were pulled into the mission to breach the border, according to multiple videos and social media accounts.
Among the detailed preparations was precise intelligence on the readiness and ability of Russian units on the border, and the number of obstacles that lay ahead, from minefields to tank traps. There weren’t many.
Ukrainian forces also used detailed knowledge of the geography to launch the attack, using forest belts for cover and roads for speed. It was only in the last days before the incursion began that commanders were briefed on the mission.
“The key, in terms of Ukraine’s success, [was that] they managed to penetrate Russian territory quite easily with little to no resistance. It was a complete surprise for the Russians, and it demonstrates that Russian intelligence services really failed to foresee any sort of Ukrainian incursion into the region,” said Seskuria.
