‘Heads will roll’ Sources say Russian officials’ corruption and negligence made Ukraine’s incursion possible — and now they fear the consequences
If it wasn’t clear from the fact that Ukraine now controls hundreds of square miles of Russian territory, multiple official sources who spoke to journalists at Verstka Media have confirmed: Russia’s military command was caught completely off guard by Kyiv’s cross-border offensive. The regional authorities were also unprepared: since they didn’t expect such an incursion to happen, they hadn’t taken the necessary defense measures, though figures like former Kursk Governor Roman Starovoit reportedly profited from billion-ruble contracts for construction projects that were never completed. Officials like him are now living in fear of the criminal cases they might face when the crisis is over, according to the sources. Meduza shares insights from Verstka’s reporting in English.
An official close to the authorities in Russia’s Kursk region told the independent outlet Verstka that while routine defense measures have been ongoing in the area nearly since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, “nobody was prepared for an invasion [of Russian territory] in practice.”
“For there to be some individual sabotage and reconnaissance groups here or there, sure,” the official said. “But what happened [on August 6] came as a surprise. The military didn’t report anything; the first 24 hours were total chaos.”
By various estimates, between 6,000 and 12,000 Ukrainian troops entered Russia’s Kursk region in the first week of the incursion. In the days after the attack began, the Russian authorities told pro-Kremlin bloggers and state-backed media to highlight the attack’s “absurdity” and emphasize how little benefit it was likely to bring to Kyiv. Within a week, however, the opposite proved true, at least in the short term: Russia was forced to divert troops from Ukraine to defend its own territory.
“The export of the fighting to Russian territory is catastrophic,” a government source told Verstka. He said he believes that the Russian military “absolutely won’t abandon its positions” in Ukraine but that at the same time, “there simply aren’t enough [soldiers].”
Even Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov appeared to allude to the planning failures that made Ukraine’s incursion possible. After ordering the creation of a “Coordination Council on security issues of the Belgorod, Bryansk, and Kursk regions,” Belousov demanded that the new body resolve issues “without delays” and report information from the ground “promptly and truthfully.”
According to one government official who spoke to Verstka, there’s a reason Belousov specifically mentioned prompt communication. “The Kremlin is very displeased with the Kursk situation. There were no timely reports about the impending enemy incursion, so now everybody’s on edge, passing the blame around: the military is blaming intelligence agencies, and Kursk officials are blaming the military,” he said.
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“Everyone’s afraid that heads will roll and there will be criminal charges, but that won’t come until later, of course,” the official continued. He noted that the incursion exposes failures not just by the Defense Ministry but also by “Kursk officials,” including both the administration led by current acting governor Alexey Smirnov and that of his predecessor, Roman Starovoit, who was promoted to Transport Minister after Vladimir Putin’s inauguration in May.
Setting the stage
Before Kyiv launched its incursion, Russia was fully focused on its own offensive in Ukraine, a Russian soldier who fought in the Kursk region in recent weeks told Verstka. According to him, Russia’s military command assumed that if Ukraine did target Russian territory, the attacks would be similar to those previously seen in the Belgorod region, where Ukraine used long-range weapons like drones and missiles but did not send troops.
Ukrainian soldiers drive an armored vehicle past a destroyed border crossing point in Ukraine’s Sumy region. August 14, 2024.
Roman Pilipey / AFP / Scanpix / LETA
Ukrainian soldiers in the Russian border town of Sudzha, which is currently controlled by the Ukrainian military. August 18, 2024.
Ed Ram / The Washington Post / Getty Images
“In territories where fighting has been going on for a long time, such as the Kharkiv front, around Avdiivka and Chasiv Yar, [the Russian military] is building fortification structures. Basically, if there’s an elevated point like a tower or a tall building, they’ll use it to direct artillery fire,” said a soldier who fought in the Kursk region in the first days of the incursion. He continued:
They’re constructing shelters and trenches reinforced with concrete around these positions. It’s almost impossible to get past these structures on foot. But in the Kursk region, along the border with Ukraine, there was nothing like that at all — just dugouts, which Akhmat [Chechen special forces] fled from, leaving conscripts behind.
The source also said that the border was insufficiently mined, which allowed Ukrainian forces to enter the Kursk region unhindered.
A source from the Kursk government told Verstka that mining the entire border would be impossible: “First of all, there are settlements very close to the border there. Slobodka-Ivanovka is two kilometers from the border; there’s Tetkino, Gordeyevka, Uspenovka, and Viktorovka. These are areas where people live and cows graze.”
The source said mining the roads that Ukrainian forces used to enter the Kursk region would also have been unfeasible. “The roads are mined only in one situation: when we’re absolutely sure that [enemy forces] are going to use them,” he said. In this case, Russian military authorities were “obviously not confident” that Ukraine was planning a cross-border offensive, he said.
According to the same source, who has worked in the Kursk government for several years, former Governor Roman Starovoit asked the Defense Ministry to send additional reserves to the Kursk region in 2022. “At that time, we were all literally shouting about this — the media wrote about it openly,” he said. A Kommersant article from May 2022, for example, quotes Starovoit as saying that troops and weapons were being sent to the region to ensure its security. Over time, however, “this tapered off,” the source says: “The reason was that there weren’t enough people. They were sending everybody they could to the front to conduct assault operations.”
Too few anti-tank barriers
A military expert who requested anonymity told Verstka that the Russian army generally builds fortifications in areas where it’s easiest for enemy troops to pass, such as in fields, on bridges, and on roads. “The question now is why there were so few fortifications, and most importantly, where the money allocated to these structures went,” he said.
That there was a shortage of effective defensive structures in the area was corroborated by a source familiar with the activities of the Kursk regional government. He said the Defense Ministry installed some “pikes” in the border areas but not enough.
According to the expert, the Defense Ministry, the regional government, and the Federal Security Service (FSB) were all involved in building defensive structures in the region. In October 2022, then-Governor Starovoit reported that two reinforced defense lines had been completed and that a third would be finished by November 5, though this appears not to have happened.
At the time, OSINT analyst Brady Africk used satellite images to create a map of Russian fortifications in the Kursk region. It showed just two lines of defense in the Korenevsky and Sudzhansky districts: one along the border and another 5–10 kilometers away. Starovoit later mentioned the border defense lines again, writing about an inspection visit he made in January 2023 and about ongoing construction in December 2023.
The Telegram channel VChK-OGPU, which purports to have insider information from Russia’s security agencies, wrote in mid-August that Starovoit was “very agitated and tense” over the situation in the Kursk region. According to the channel, about 16 billion rubles ($175 million) were spent on building defensive structures under Starovoit’s governorship:
The decision to build [the structures] was made at a meeting of the operational headquarters led by Governor Starovoit. The customer (the regional governmental organization “Capital Construction Directorate of the Kursk Region”) and the contractor (the joint-stock company “Kursk Regional Development Corporation”) were both clear and were fully controlled by Starovoit and his associates. The work, which was supposed to be finished by mid-2023, has yet to be completed, of course, but the budget has been steadily siphoned off.
In late 2023, the Kursk Regional Prosecutor’s Office initiated a lawsuit seeking to recover over two billion rubles ($22 million) from the contractors, but the case was “swept under the rug” and never made it to court, VChK-OGPU reported.
Verstka has previously reported on corruption in the construction of defense lines on Russia’s border. In 2023, the region’s Capital Construction Directorate signed two contracts for the construction of fortifications worth 3.2 billion rubles ($35 million) by July 5 of that year. The agency refused to sign contracts with construction workers, forcing them to register as self-employed, to avoid paying a higher tax rate. At some point, however, the workers stopped being paid at all, prompting them to file a lawsuit that they later won. According to court documents, the builders worked on fortifications about 100 kilometers (62 miles) west of where the Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU) broke through on August 6.
According to the military expert who spoke to Verstka, the fortifications in the Kursk region ultimately turned out to be much less formidable than those in Russia’s Belgorod region. “[The Kursk region] was likely chosen precisely because the defense line there was the weakest,” he said.