Russians seek answers over hundreds missing after Ukraine's 2024 incursion

Russians are demanding answers about hundreds of people still unaccounted for after Ukraine’s 2024 incursion

Russian families say their government did little to help find the missing

“I used to have complete faith in our country,” says Lyubov. The last time she spoke to her mother was a day after Ukrainian forces entered Russia’s Kursk region more than two years ago.

Now she says she feels “resentful towards the [Russian] state” in a country where most people avoid criticising the full-scale invasion launched against Ukraine in February 2022.

The local governor says more than 300 Russians are still missing in Kursk region, though no-one really knows the real number.

Lyubov says she tried to persuade her mother to leave her village in the Sudzha area, but blames Russian state TV “propaganda” for her refusal to listen. Russian authorities estimate that about 2,000 people remained in the settlements captured by Ukraine’s military.

“The state channels were convincing viewers that ‘everything is under control: two or three days, and it’ll be just as it was before’,” she recalls.

She still cannot understand why Russian authorities were unable to stop Ukrainian soldiers storming two border checkpoints in August 2024, taking around 40 prisoners and bombing a convoy carrying Russian soldiers.

Within six days, they had seized more than 777 sq km (300 sq miles) of Russian territory, as Ukraine’s military tried to pull Russian forces away from its front-line offensive.

For most of the following eight months, mobile and internet connections were cut off.

Russia’s foreign ministry repeatedly accused Ukraine of war crimes against civilians, allegations Kyiv rejected as completely unfounded.

Nearly 200 Russians sent a letter to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and the United Nations, asking them to arrange a humanitarian corridor to evacuate civilians.

That never happened and, by late autumn, fighting was raging as Russian forces tried to retake the territory.

Lyubov and others who had lost contact with their relatives began forming groups.

While many Russians tried to flee the Ukrainian incursion (above), others believed Russian state TV reports and stayed

One resident, whose family friends had also remained behind, began putting together a list of people she saw in videos published by the Ukrainian military and journalists. She then started recording those believed to have died and where they were buried.

“At first, in a panic, you try to do something – anything – to find some sort of information,” she said. “Taking action brings a certain sense of relief, and that’s how you can cope with the stress.”

Soon, the list contained about 1,000 names.

Lyubov wrote to the Red Cross and the Kursk interior ministry asking for help, but received no reply.

In early 2025, Russia’s human rights commissioner released a list of 517 Kursk residents reported missing. The list confused the names of missing people with those searching for them, and families said it felt like a “slap in the face”.

“Publishing something like this is the height of incompetence and a lack of basic respect for people,” said one young woman whose parents had gone missing, in a video shared online.

Heavy fighting was reported in late 2024 in the village of Darino, where Lyubov and her mother were from, and authorities said 90% of it had been destroyed.

Ukrainian soldiers held a large area around Sudzha for eight months

The Russian military later retook the village and then began evacuating those who had survived, along with the bodies of those who had not.

One of the evacuees contacted Lyubov and told her she had lived with her mother for the previous few weeks. Her mother had died, she explained, after a head injury in circumstances that remain unclear.

A few other elderly people had also died, she said, unable to cope with wartime conditions.

Lyubov waited in vain for her mother’s body to be brought out, while other families had no idea whether their relatives were alive or dead.

People complained that no-one was searching for their loved ones and that there was no single list of the missing.

Lyubov heard that the bodies of neighbours who died alongside her mother had been taken away from Darino in April, but her mother’s body was still missing.

She tried and failed to get an answer from the authorities: “They wouldn’t listen, and everyone just kept saying that it was dangerous there, and no-one was going to deal with it right now.”

Russian forces eventually regained control of the area seized by Ukraine in August 2024

The head of one local village council, Yuri Tkachev, was among volunteers who went to recover the bodies of civilians from streets or nearby fields.

“It’s hard for people to know – or rather not to know – what has happened to their loved ones, whether they’re being held captive or have died, and where they died,” he said.

Body bags and fuel for vans used in the evacuations were paid for either by the volunteers themselves or through donations, not by the authorities.

Although regional officials met the group searching for the missing several times in the second half of 2025, relatives said it made little difference.

Lyubov was still looking for her mother’s body until she visited the mortuary last October during a trip to the regional capital Kursk.

“I just asked: ‘A woman born in 1949 from the village of Darino – are there any unidentified bodies?’”

The official turned his laptop screen towards her and she immediately recognised her dead mother in a photograph from April 2025.

She was lying on her side in the street, her knees bent. Lyubov tried not to look too closely. She recognised her mother’s face and an old jumper she wore while working.

She had given a DNA sample in January but was told it had been lost, so her mother’s body had remained unidentified in the mortuary for several months.

She had wanted to bury her mother in their home village, but that is impossible for now, so she has been cremated and her ashes are in Lyubov’s apartment in Belgorod, about 100 miles away.

She is angry that the government failed to stop the incursion, did not evacuate residents when it could, and convinced them the situation was not serious.

When the BBC asked for comment on this story, there was no response from the Kursk governor, Russia’s human rights commissioner or the Russian Red Cross.

The command of Ukraine’s Territorial Defence Forces and Ukraine’s human rights commissioner said all civilians they evacuated from Kursk region had been handed over to Russia.

Lyubov remembers when she used to cycle across the border into Ukraine to buy sausages, yarn and ice cream.

“We went to see them, and they came to see us. And now not one of these villages exists any more.”