“Russia knew”. Those documents on Kursk… –

The Russian military command anticipated Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk region and had plans to prevent it, according to documents found by the Ukrainian military at abandoned Russian positions and cited by the Guardian, which cautions that it has not been able to “independently verify the authenticity of the documents, although they bear the hallmarks of genuine Russian military communications.” Some of the documents are printed orders distributed to various units, while others are handwritten logs recording events and concerns at specific locations. The earliest entries are dated to late 2023, while the most recent documents are just six weeks before Ukraine launched its incursion into the Kursk region on August 6.

The launch of the operation on Russian soil, the British newspaper recalls, took Kiev’s Western partners and many members of the Ukrainian elite by surprise, as the planning had been limited to a very small number of people. But Russian military documents contain months of warnings about a possible incursion into the area and an attempt to occupy Sudzha, a town of 5,000 residents that is now under Ukrainian occupation. When the Ukrainian attack occurred on August 6, many Russian soldiers abandoned their positions and within a week Ukraine had taken full control of Sudzha. “They ran away, without even evacuating or destroying their documents,” said a member of the special operations team that seized the files.