The 1st Panzer Group, led by Generaloberst Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist, was ordered to secure the Bug River crossings and advance to Rovno and Korosten with the strategic objective of Kiev.

It deployed two corps forward and advanced between Lviv and Rovno in an attempt to cut the Lviv–Kiev railway line, thus driving a wedge along junction point between the Soviet 5th and 6th Armies.

The Southwestern Front, under the command of General Mikhail Kirponos, had received incomplete intelligence on the size and direction of the German attack.

3 read: While maintaining strong defense of the state border with Hungary, the 5th and 6th armies are to carry out concentric strikes in the direction of Lublin, utilizing at least five mechanized corps and aviation of the Front, in order to encircle and destroy the enemy group of forces advancing along the Vladimir-Volynski-Krystonopol front, and by the end of June 24th to capture the vicinity of Lublin.

[5] By the end of 22 June, Zhukov was on his way to the Southwestern Front headquarters at Ternopil along with Nikita Khrushchev, the former head of the Organizational Department of the Ukrainian Communist Party's Central Committee, to ensure these orders were carried out.

This essentially brought all the mobile assets of the Southwestern Front to bear against the base of von Kleist's thrust toward Kiev.

In the first few hours of the invasion, German commanders were shocked to find that some Soviet tanks were immune to all anti-tank weapons in use by the Wehrmacht.

During the interwar years, farsighted military theorists such as Mikhail Tukhachevsky came to similar conclusions as Guderian regarding tanks in modern warfare.

Surviving armored warfare theorists such as Konstantin Rokossovsky were quickly and quietly reinstated in their positions and began assembling tanks into concentrated formations with all possible speed.

However, by June 1941 this process was barely half complete, so many of the 19,000 tanks in the Red Army arsenal were still dispersed among infantry divisions on the eve of the invasion.

Compounding the problem was that Stalin strictly forbade any Red Army unit from opening fire on reconnaissance patrols, allowing the Germans to easily identify all major targets in the border districts.

That meant that simple mechanical problems resulted in hundreds of Red Army tanks being abandoned on the road side en route to the battle.

[6] On 22 June 1941, the balance of tanks over the entire area of the German Army Group South and the Soviet Southwestern Front, including but not limited to the main battle of Brody, was as follows.

The figures presented above for Soviet formations are "on hand" totals for those units and do not reflect actual operational vehicle numbers.

Even these apparently impressive on-hand numbers are not close to the units' authorized strengths because those organizations were still in the process of being formed and equipped at the time of the invasion.

[7] The 15th, 19th, and 22nd Mechanized Corps were only created a few months prior to the start of the war, leaving these formations unprepared, uncoordinated, ill- or untrained, and not ready for effective combat operations.

The condition of the Soviet Air Force assigned to the Southwestern Front followed the pattern of the entire front line: the majority of its aircraft had been destroyed on the ground as a result of Stalin – disregarding intelligence that a German attack was imminent – refusing to put Soviet forces on alert.

The plan called for these forces to assemble and begin offensive operations at 22:00 on 23 June, 36 hours after the initial German onslaught, in an attempt to catch the attackers off guard, and before they could solidify their position by bringing up reinforcements from the rear in support of their fast-advancing 11th Panzer Division.

"[17] These complications were compounded by the apparent inability of the Soviet commanders to assess an appropriate axis of attack in the context of the rapidly developing German salient.

During the nearly 500 kilometer march, the Corps lost up to half of its older tanks and a substantial portion of its artillery and anti-tank guns to both enemy air attack and mechanical breakdowns.

[citation needed] As a result of these and other problems assembling the forces for the attack, the scheduled time for the operation was set back 6 hours to 04:00 on 24 June.

[18] Even with the delayed schedule, the counter-attack began piecemeal, since the full complement of forces could not be brought into position until two days later.

[22] Major General Semyon Kondrusev was killed by a shell during fighting near the village of Aleksandrovska in the Volyn region on June 24, 1941.

On 27 June, Popel's group surprised and defeated the rear of 11th Panzer Division and captured Dubno, a road crossing of strategic importance.

This was the most successful Soviet action of the battle, as it cut off supply lines of the German armoured spearhead (the 11th Panzer Division).

[7] The effect of the hesitation and confusion of command on the 27th of June on the outcome of the battle and the German attack into Ukraine is hard to determine.

Shortly after the Soviet counter-attack was routed, Marshal Semyon Budyonny was given overall command of the combined Southwestern and Southern Front.

The new KV-1 and KV-2 heavy tanks were impervious to virtually all German anti-tank weapons, but the Red Army's logistics had completely broken down due to Luftwaffe attacks.

This defensive success enabled the Germans to continue their offensive, even if it had been delayed substantially by the tenacity of the Soviet counter-attack.

The 8th Mechanised Corps was so badly depleted that the Stavka disbanded its headquarters and parcelled out its remaining assets to other formations of the Southwestern Front.