How Russia looked the wrong way as Ukraine invaded

Russian forces caught off guard by Ukrainian invasion, raising questions about surveillance and border fortifications.

In the hours before Ukrainian soldiers stormed across Russia's western border, there was no sign from Moscow that anything was amiss.

At midnight at the start of August 6, the Russian Defence Ministry posted good news: more than 2,500 members of the regiment responsible for the capture of a town in eastern Ukraine would receive state awards for heroism.

Later that morning, as Ukraine began the biggest invasion of Russia since World War Two, the ministry published video showing General Valery Gerasimov, commander of the Russian war effort, visiting a different combat zone, also in Ukraine. He heard reports from commanders and set "tasks for further actions", it said.

The footage did not specify the exact time of the visit, but revealed no concerns, or knowledge, of the events unfolding in Russia's western Kursk region that threatened to upset Gerasimov's plans and shift the course of the two-and-a-half-year war.

Panic spread quickly among local Russian residents in the early hours of the assault, despite repeated attempts by authorities to assure them that everything was under control, according to a timeline by Reuters of the first two days of the incursion, based on public statements, social media posts and analysis of video footage.

The idea that Ukraine could turn the tables on Russia and burst onto the territory of its much bigger neighbour seemed unthinkable to most observers before last week. The shock operation has raised questions about the effectiveness of Russia's surveillance, as well as the calibre of its border fortifications and the forces guarding them.

"The Russians had a complete intelligence failure here," French military expert Yohann Michel, research fellow at the IESD institute in Lyon, said in an interview.