Ukrainian commander who invaded Russia said his troops had no idea that’s where they were going until the last minute

• Ukrainian forces launched a stunning invasion into Russia’s Kursk region last August.

• A Ukrainian commander revealed new details of the operation in an interview with BI.

• He said his forces didn’t know they were going to cross into Russia until the day before.

Ukrainian forces who took part in last year’s shock invasion of Russia had no idea they were about to launch a cross-border assault until the day before the mission, a commander told Business Insider.

Oleksii Vovkotrub was the commander of the 1st Platoon, part of the 1st Assault Company of the 33rd Separate Assault Regiment, when his unit entered Russia’s Kursk region on August 6. He revealed new details of the operation in a recent interview with BI.

The daring invasion, which came as a surprise to Ukraine’s partners and caught Moscow completely off guard, marked the biggest attack on Russian soil by a foreign enemy since World War II.

Vovkotrub, whose call sign is Wolf, said that the operation was classified. Ukraine’s forces had been gathering in the northeastern Sumy region, which borders Russia, but they didn’t know the final objective of their build-up at the time. Up to that point, the war had been fought almost entirely in Ukraine, a few cross-border raids aside.

“The details of the mission were only revealed to us the day before deployment,” Vovkotrub, now the acting commander of the 1st Assault Company of the 33rd Separate Assault Regiment, recalled. “Of course, the guys were a bit nervous, but overall, the mood was high,” he said. “We were eager to strike the enemy on their own territory.”

Vovkotrub said that his mission in Kursk was to seize and hold a platoon strongpoint until infantry soldiers arrived to secure the position. His unit advanced into Russia as part of an armored formation supported by German-made Marder infantry fighting vehicles and Soviet-era T-72 tanks.

“Riding in on armor felt good,” Vovkotrub said. “I won’t hide that, especially after everything they did on our land.” By this stage of the war, the Ukrainians had been fighting Russia’s invasion of their country for about two and a half years.

Ukrainian soldiers have said that they were able to easily breach Russia’s borders, meeting little to no resistance until they reached the outskirts of Sudzha.

It wasn’t until the second morning of the invasion into Kursk that the platoon first engaged in combat, trying to capture the objective strongpoint. The Ukrainians clashed with Russian soldiers while clearing two villages in the Sudzha district, just a few miles across the border, and fighting to secure enemy positions in the tree lines.

“In the end, the mission was successfully completed without any losses on our side,” Vovkotrub said. His unit stayed in Kursk until late August, though they would deploy again later.

Ukrainian forces quickly seized some 500 square miles of territory in Kursk and captured dozens of villages during the early weeks of the invasion, which was intended to ease some pressure off other areas of the front lines and provide Kyiv with more leverage at potential peace talks.

Russian counteroffensives in the months since have seen the country regain roughly half of the land that it initially lost in Kursk, but Ukraine still has a foothold in the region. It is proving difficult for the Russians to dislodge them completely.

Moscow has relied on the deployment of thousands of North Korean forces to help with these efforts, but they have been taking heavy losses in combat. Ukraine’s military revealed recently that the North Koreans hadn’t been seen in weeks, suggesting they may have withdrawn.

Hard fighting continues in this sector. Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, said Monday that the Kursk operation remains a key priority for Kyiv.

Read the original article on Business Insider