How a General’s Mistake Left Russia’s Border VulnerableSubscriber Exclusive

In the spring of this year, the new military official appointed by Moscow to oversee security in Kursk province dismantled a council tasked with protecting the vulnerable border region. According to a Russian security official, Lt. Gen. Alexander Lapin claimed that the military alone had the strength and resources to protect Russia’s border.

The plan left another hole in Russia’s weak border defenses, which collapsed earlier this month when Ukrainian troops executed a lightning offensive across the border to Kursk. Ukrainian troops crossed the border and encountered disorganized Russian troops. They moved forward and now claim to occupy over 1,000 square kilometers of Russian territory.

Of course, Lapin did not single-handedly open the gates to the first foreign invasion of Russian territory since World War II. He faced a critical shortage of men But his misstep is characteristic of a high command often disconnected from the reality of the battlefield, which is now ravaging Moscow in its attempt to expel Ukrainian forces from its territory.

Since the beginning of the war, Russia’s centralized, top-down thinking, one of the defining characteristics of the president’s Russia, has been Vladimir Putin proved counterproductive on the battlefield. It prevented serious planning in the Kremlin, and when those plans failed, it prevented Russian forces from improvising to respond to rapid events.

“Putin’s power vertical still exists, but for now it’s working against Russian goals on the ground,” said William Courtney, a former U.S. diplomat and adjunct professor at Rand. “And because Russia plans from above, its response to unexpected and rapid events is incredibly hampered, because no one on the ground is taking the initiative.”

On Wednesday, Ukraine launched a new attack inside Russia, this time sending at least 45 drones to the border regions of Bryansk, Kursk and Belgorod in an attempt to overwhelm air defenses and strike Moscow. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said nearly a dozen drones hit areas near the capital, calling it one of the largest attacks since the war began. All of the drones, he said, were shot down by air defense systems and no damage or casualties were reported elsewhere.

It is unclear whether the interagency council that Lapin dissolved, a body that brings together military officials and local and regional security officials, would have helped organize a coherent response from Moscow. But without a centralized body in charge of the Russian response, Moscow’s efforts to expel Kiev’s forces have so far been chaotic and ineffective. That has left Russian security agencies, such as the Interior Ministry and the Federal Security Service, which are responsible for internal security, and the Defense Ministry, which is responsible for the fight inside Ukraine, scrambling to lead the response.

“Russia is still preparing its response to this Ukrainian incursion. It’s been a fairly slow and scattered response,” Gen. Christopher Cavoli, commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, told the Council on Foreign Relations on Thursday. “Part of that is because it’s not clear who’s in charge.”

The Russian Defense Ministry did not respond to a request for comment. It has not publicly explained how it allowed Ukrainian forces to cross into Russian territory. Hours after the Ukrainian incursion, Russian General Staff Chief Gen. Valery Gerasimov said Lapin’s forces and border guards were working “to destroy the enemy in areas directly adjacent to the Russian-Ukrainian border.”

Gerasimov has not made any public appearances since the raid.

The first response is reminiscent of the early days of the uprising led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, who led the Wagner mercenary group in Ukraine. He sent his forces to Moscow to oust his rivals, whom he blamed for Russia’s military problems: Gerasimov and Sergei Shoigu, then defense minister.

According to Courtney, despite signs that he was considering launching an insurrection, the Kremlin was caught off guard and frozen in the face of Prigozhin’s actions. Prigozhin, who ultimately stopped the rebellion from marching toward Moscow, died two months later when his plane exploded in mid-air over Russia.

In the days before the invasion of Ukraine, Russian military correspondents said, Lapin’s command had sent Moscow reports warning that Ukrainian forces were increasing their numbers on the front lines. But that trick had already been used by both sides as a psychological warfare tactic, people familiar with the border maneuvers said, and Moscow dismissed the warnings.

Despite reports of military movements, troops under Lapin’s command did not act by strengthening defensive lines or laying mines, as Russian soldiers did last year to thwart a major and well-prepared Ukrainian counteroffensive. When Ukrainian soldiers entered the no man’s land between Ukraine and Russia, they encountered no resistance and, in Russia, no territorial defense forces to slow their advance.

Ukrainian forces They used electronic jamming to disable communications which prevented Russian forces from contacting their commanders. The lightly armed Russian forces were pinned behind the front line and scattered in the forest. Some mounted localized resistance, ambushing Ukrainian forces that moved in to mop up the assault troops. But hundreds of Russian soldiers, many of them conscripts, simply surrendered.

“In Moscow, they simply did not consider that such a scenario could happen,” said Konrad Muzyka, director of Poland-based consultancy Rochan, which specializes in the Russian military.

The defensive planning proved almost as disastrous as the initial Russian invasion itself, when military planners, relying on faulty intelligence – and the belief that the Ukrainian military would collapse in the face of a large-scale assault – sent armored columns into Ukraine in parade formation, making them easy targets for drones and anti-tank weapons.

Similarly, when Ukrainian soldiers entered Russia, their first armed resistance was that of the 488th Motorized Rifle Regiment of the 144th Motorized Rifle Brigade, a unit composed almost entirely of conscripts who, according to Russian policy, should not fight inside Ukraine. The demands of the front had exhausted the manpower and resources of the Russian forces.

Under normal circumstances, they would have had about 120 armored vehicles, including tanks and armored personnel carriers. In their first armed clash, the recruits probably numbered between 10 and 20, Muzyka said.

This was not the first time that poor planning and a lack of personnel had combined under Lapin’s command. In early September 2022, Ukrainian forces launched a surprise attack in northeastern Ukraine. Without the Russians having adequately fortified their meager frontline positions, the Ukrainians overran them with fast field vehicles, followed by heavier armored echelons. The Russian offensive line collapsed, and Ukraine managed to reclaim thousands of square kilometers in the northeast of the country.

After the debacle, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov called for his resignation: “I would demote Lapin to the rank of private, strip him of his decorations and send him to the front with a machine gun.”

Some Russian military correspondents considered this criticism unfair, since Lapin had just been transferred to the area where the Russian lines collapsed. However, the officer was soon dismissed from his post and was later reappointed as deputy commander of the Russian forces in Ukraine.

The fiasco led the Kremlin to rethink its personnel problem, and a month later Russia launched a general mobilization to bolster its meager defenses. Since then, the financial incentives offered by contract service have kept the flow of volunteers into Russian recruiting offices at a rate of about 1,000 a day. This has allowed the Russian war machine to destroy swathes of Ukraine in a war of attrition, but high casualties have depleted strategic reserves, limiting the amount of manpower the Kremlin can now direct toward Kursk.

Now, as Russia seeks to gain control of its own territory, it is bringing in forces from eastern Ukraine, even if it means withdrawing its troops from the front lines. This clumsy response has shown that Ukraine’s incursion into Russian territory has hit Moscow’s weak point: contingency planning.

“It certainly demonstrated the creativity and prowess of the Ukrainians on the battlefield,” Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said. “They clearly forced the Russians to redouble their efforts in their response.”