It looks like Russia was massively unprepared for Ukraine’s attack on its territory

Russian officials released this image, saying it shows a destroyed house following Ukrainian attacks in the Kursk region.

A Ukrainian incursion into Russian territory over the past two days appears to have caught Moscow unprepared, according to multiple reports.

Locals in the Kursk region rushed to evacuate without state support, and Russian military bloggers have angrily asked why Russian forces were not readier.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin offered contradictory information about what’s happening, which suggests disarray at the top.

The exact scale of the incursion is still unknown. An analysis by the Institute for the Study of War said Ukrainian armored vehicles pushed at least 6 miles into Kursk, which borders northern Ukraine.

Russian officials said that as of Tuesday, Ukraine had sent up to 1,000 troops into the fight, backed by 11 tanks and 20 armored combat vehicles. Footage shared by Russian military bloggers suggests that at least two Ukrainian brigades are involved.

As of Thursday, the ISW assessed that Ukrainian forces had passed two defensive lines.

Ukraine has not commented on the operation, and B-17 could not independently confirm the details.

Russia has offered mixed accounts of what’s happening — Alexei Smirnov, Kursk’s acting governor, said the situation was under control on Wednesday as President Vladimir Putin convened an emergency meeting with his security chiefs.

“It appears that yet again, in the past few days, the Ukrainians have surprised Russia, and observers in the West, with their latest operation,” Mick Ryan, a war analyst and retired Australian major general, wrote in a recent analysis.

He said that “the Ukrainians have attacked with a highly mobile, mechanised force,” strongly supported by air defense.

Russia declared a state of emergency in the region. It began an evacuation of the region’s border towns, state-controlled media reported.

But one resident in Sudzha — a major focus of the Ukrainian attack — told the independent Russian outlet Meduza that she had fled already, hours before any evacuation was offered.

On Tuesday, her family had been “awoken at 3 a.m. by the sound of the missiles being launched at us,” she told the outlet.

Kursk Nuclear Power Plant also appears to have been thinly protected, with Russia only belatedly moving air-defense units into the area, the Kyiv Post reported, citing the independent Russian outlet iStories, which said it spoke with employees at the plant.

Several Russian military bloggers excoriated the Kremlin for what they saw as a failure to prepare or respond effectively, the ISW said.

The influential pro-Kremlin account Rybar wrote on Wednesday that Russia’s military top brass had been monitoring a Ukrainian buildup for the past two months but did little to prepare.

Early on Wednesday, Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian Security Council chair, wrote in a Telegram post that serious lessons needed to be learned.

On Wednesday, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, suggested that the US also had limited knowledge, saying: “We’re going to reach out to the Ukrainian military to learn more about their objectives.”