In the initial chaos of the thrust, Moscow’s military response was hampered by a lack of clarity on who was in charge.
“This AFU (Armed Forces of Ukraine) operation has successfully exploited seams of responsibility between the FSB (Federal Security Service), Rosgvardia (National Guard) and MoD (Ministry of Defence),” said Dara Massicot, a Russian defence scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“I suspect targeted leaks will emerge between the MoD/GRU (General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation) and the FSB over who is responsible for intel and defence failures,” she added.
Command and control – the exercise of authority by a commander over designated units, and what Nato militaries call “C2” – is crucial to operations, and has plagued the Russian army throughout the war.
This part of the border was particularly chaotic.
Unlike in the war zone inside Ukraine, the Russian chain of command on the border is hopelessly muddled.
The FSB’s border guard service has responsibility for the frontier. Internal defence is overseen by the Rosgvardia who are meant to back them up. They are separate agencies, and neither of them answer to the army or MoD.
For the army, Kursk is in the area of responsibility of the Moscow military district (MMD) commanded by Colonel General Sergey Kuzovlev. Most of its regular troops are now engaged in Ukraine.
The MMD, one of five military-administrative districts in Russia, is a new formation: it only came into being earlier this year when Vladimir Putin split the former Western military district in two in response to Nato expansion.
Alexei Smirnov, Kursk’s regional governor, is in charge of civilian evacuations, with the ministry of emergency situations chipping in.
No one has built a “Surovikin line”, or anything like the lines of trenches and minefields that defeated the Ukrainians in Zaporizhzhya last year.