East of Oryol, the Red Army deployed Popov's Bryansk Front. Its right wing, the 61st Army, was responsible for the auxiliary offensive, and the 3rd and 63rd Armies in the middle were the main offensive. The Front Reserve consisted of the 1st Guards Tank Corps (207 tank self-propelled guns) and the 20th Tank Corps (184 tank self-propelled guns).
Rear of the Bryansk Front, the 3rd Guards Tank Army (Commander Rebarko), which had 731 tanks and self-propelled guns (475 T-34, 224 T-70, 32 self-propelled guns) was deployed.
Above, north and east of Oryol, the Red Army deployed a total of 645074 men and 1832 tanks with self-propelled guns. It is worth noting, however, that the Western Front, which attacked the northern flank of the German army, was weak, with only half the strength of the Bryansk Front, which attacked from the front, and only 2/3 of the tanks. Such an irrational deployment of troops is obviously not conducive to the implementation of the encirclement campaign.
Zhukov later blamed it on the haste of moving to the offensive too hasty to build a strong assault group for the Western Front. From an objective analysis, the Red Army's preparation time was not short, starting in May. But from the time Zhukov and Stalin finalized the date of the offensive to the time the battle began, there were only 2-3 days in total, and there was obviously no time to complete the pre-war maneuvers.