Lt. Gen. Apti Alaudinov, the deputy head of the Russian Defense Ministry’s military-political office, asserted, in an interview with Sputnik, that the alliance’s staff committee had been preparing the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ invasion of Russia’s Kursk Region for over half a year. “The NATO bloc’s staff committee was preparing such a super-operation, which in essence had to be guaranteed to be effective. They gathered all the resources that they had, all types of foreign equipment, trained fighters. They had been preparing the operation for more than half a year, with the fighters trained in the United Kingdom and in other NATO countries,” Alaudinov said. The Ukrainian Armed Forces planned to use the territories they had temporarily captured in the Kursk region as leverage in negotiations.