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Earlier this year, a Russian general disbanded a group charged with guarding the borders of Kursk.
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Colonel General Alexander Lapin said the Russian military is strong enough, a security official said.
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Ukraine surprised Russia on August 6 with a surprise attack on Kursk.
A Russian general has disbanded a group tasked with guarding Kursk’s borders months before Ukraine’s surprise invasion, The Wall Street Journal reported reportedquoting an anonymous Russian security service official.
Colonel General Alexander Lapin was appointed In May he was commander of the Leningrad Military District and was responsible for overseeing security in the Kursk region.
Lapin was responsible for disbanding an interdepartmental council of military and local and regional security officials that was supposed to coordinate the response to the Ukrainian invasion this month.
According to the official, Lapin said the Russian military has the strength and resources to independently defend the border.
It is unclear how effective the agency’s response would have been to Ukraine’s surprise attack, the outlet said. But without the agency, Russia would certainly have struggled to push back Ukrainian troops.
Ukraine caught Russia — as well as his Western allies — on August 6, surprised by a surprise attack on the Kursk border region, killing approximately 386 miles of territory within a few days.
Ukraine says its troops have been in the military for the past two weeks as much territory as Russia has this year, and destroyed at least two bridges, cutting off supplies for Russian soldiers and tightening Ukraine’s grip on the area.
On Tuesday, Ukrainian Supreme Commander Oleksandr Syrskyi said his forces had pushed back Russian soldiers up to 22 miles to Russia and conquered 99 settlements.
Business Insider was unable to independently verify these figures.
Geolocated film material shared by military Observers on Tuesday saw Ukrainian forces reach an area 19 kilometers inside the country.
Russia, meanwhile, has struggled to respond quickly and effectively to the attack, partly because of its complex military structures and a lack of contingency plans.
It is also forced to divert troops of the fighting in eastern Ukraine.
Although the invasion of Kursk — now in its third week — appears to be progressing, could easily backfire on Ukraine.
A Ukrainian commander told the Financial Times This week, Russian soldiers reported advancing in eastern Ukraine after diverting ammunition from military operations in Kursk, forcing his soldiers to ration cannon shells.
According to Matthew Savill, director of military science at the Royal United Services Institute, the biggest risk to Ukraine is manpower.
If Ukrainian forces try to hold Kursk in the long term, they will expand the front line of the battle, he told Business Insider on Tuesday.
“This raises the stakes and may lead them to commit to a position beyond what is sustainable,” he said.
Analysts at the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank, came to a similar assessment in a update on sunday.
They also said that due to the scale of the conflict, neither Russia nor Ukraine can win the war with a single campaign.
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