structural:summarization
Soviet offensive controversy

From 2 February 1941, as the chief of the general staff, and Deputy Minister of Defense, Zhukov was said to take part in drawing up the "Strategic plan for deployment of the forces of the Soviet Union in the event of war with Germany and its allies." The plan was completed no later than 15 May 1941, according to a dated document found in the Soviet archives after they were declassified in the 1990s. Some researchers, such as Victor Suvorov, have theorized that on 14 May, Soviet People's Commissar of Defense Semyon Timoshenko and General Zhukov presented these plans to Stalin for a preemptive attack against Germany through Southern Poland.

Soviet forces would occupy the Vistula Border and continue to Katowice or even Berlin —should the main German armies retreat—or the Baltic coast, should German forces not retreat and be forced to protect Poland and East Prussia. The attacking Soviets were supposed to reach Siedlce, Dęblin, and then capture Warsaw before penetrating toward the southwest and imposing final defeat at Lublin.

Historians do not have the original documents that could verify the existence of such a plan, and there is no evidence that Stalin accepted it. In a transcript of an interview on 26 May 1965, Zhukov said that Stalin did not approve the plan. But Zhukov did not clarify whether execution was attempted. As of 1999, no other approved plan for a Soviet attack had been found.

On 10 June 1941, Zhukov sent a message to the Military Council of the Kiev Special Military District, after someone, most likely the commander of the Kiev district, Mikhail Kirponos, had ordered troops on the border to occupy forward positions. Zhukov ordered: "Such action could provoke the Germans into armed confrontation fraught with all sorts of consequences. Revoke this order immediately and report who, specifically, gave such an unauthorised order." On 11 June, he sent a telegram saying that his immediate superior, Timoshenko, had ordered that they were to report back by 16 June confirming that the troops had been withdrawn from their forward positions." According to the historian David E. Murphy, "the action by Timoshenko and Zhukov must have been initiated at the request of Stalin."

David Glantz and Jonathan House, American scholars of the Red Army, argue that "the Soviet Union was not ready for war in June 1941, nor did it intend, as some have contended, to launch a preventative war." Gerhard Weinberg, a scholar of Nazi foreign policy, supports their view, arguing that Adolf Hitler 's decision to launch Operation Barbarossa was not because of a sense of urgent foreboding, but rather from a "purposeful determination" and he had started his planning for the invasion well in advance of the summer of 1941