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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 the Kursk border months before Ukraine’s surprise invasion, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing an anonymous Russian security official.
Colonel General Alexander Lapin was appointed commander of the Leningrad Military District in May 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 surprised Russia – and its Western allies – on August 6 by launching a surprise attack on the Kursk border region, capturing about 100,000 of the country’s residents. 386 miles of territory within a few days.
Ukraine says its troops have captured as much territory in the past two weeks as Russia has this year. At least two bridges have also been destroyed, 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 35 kilometers (22 miles) into Russia and captured 99 settlements.
Business Insider was unable to independently verify these figures.
Geolocated images shared by military observers on Tuesday showed Ukrainian troops reaching an area 12 miles (19 kilometers) into the country.
Meanwhile, Russia has struggled to respond quickly and effectively to the attack, partly due to its complex military structures and lack of contingency plans.
The country has also been forced to withdraw troops from fighting in eastern Ukraine.
While the invasion — now in its third week — appears to be making progress in Kursk, it could easily backfire for Ukraine.
A Ukrainian commander told the Financial Times this week that Russian soldiers were making progress in eastern Ukraine because ammunition was being diverted to 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 think tank Institute for the Study of War came to a similar conclusion in an 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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