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

ByAnastasia Platonova BBC News Russian.

Key points

• Early in 2025, Russia's human rights commissioner published a list of 517 Kursk residents documented missing.
• Now she feels "resentful towards the state", in a country where most individuals avoid criticising the full-scale invasion unleashed on Ukraine in February 2022.
• The local governor notes more than 300 Russians are still missing in Kursk region, but no-one really knows the true figure.
• Asked by the BBC to comment on this story, there was no response from the Kursk governor, Russia's human rights commissioner or the Russian Red Cross.
• Although regional authorities met the group searching for the missing a number of times in the second half of 2025, relatives complained it created little difference.

"I used to have complete faith in our country, " notes Lyubov. The last time she spoke to her mother was a day after Ukrainian forces broke into Russia's Kursk region more than two years ago.

Meanwhile, the local governor notes more than 300 Russians are still missing in Kursk region, but no-one really knows the true figure.

Lyubov notes 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. Some 2, 000 individuals remained in the settlements captured by Ukraine's military, Russian authorities estimate.

"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 fails to understand why Russian authorities could not stop Ukrainian soldiers storming two border checkpoints in August 2024, taking around 40 prisoners and bombing a convoy carrying Russian soldiers.

As Ukraine's military sought to divert Russian forces away from their front-line offensive, within six days they had overrun more than 777 sq km (300 sq miles) of Russian territory.

For most of the next eight months, mobile and internet links were down.

Russia's foreign ministry repeatedly accused Ukraine of war crimes against civilians: allegations rejected in Kyiv as completely unfounded.

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

It never happened and, by late autumn, battles raged as Russian forces sought to retake the territory.

Lyubov and others who had lost contact with their loved ones began to form groups.

One resident, whose family friends had additionally stayed behind, began compiling a list of residents she saw on videos published by the Ukrainian military and journalists. Then she began detailing 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 remarked. "Taking action brings a certain sense of relief, and that's how you can cope with the stress." Shortly concerning 1, 000 names were on the list.

Lyubov wrote to the Red Cross and Kursk interior ministry appealing for support, but had no response.

Early in 2025, Russia's human rights commissioner published a list of 517 Kursk residents documented missing. The list mixed up names of the missing with those who were searching for them, and the families remarked it was like a "slap in the face".

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

Heavy fighting had been documented in late 2024 in the village of Darino, where Lyubov and mother were from, and authorities stated that 90% of it had been destroyed.

Meanwhile, the Russian military regained control of the village and then began evacuating those who had survived, and the bodies of those who had not.

One of the evacuees obtained in touch with Lyubov, telling her she had lived with her mother for the past few weeks. After a head injury in circumstances that remain unclear, her mum had passed away, she explained.

In practice, a few other elderly individuals had additionally died, she noted, unable to cope with wartime conditions.

While other families had no idea if their relatives were alive or dead, lyubov waited in vain for her mother's body to be brought out.

Individuals complained no-one was searching for their loved ones and that there was no single list of those 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 obtain 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."

Meanwhile, the head of one local village council, Yuri Tkachev, was among volunteers who went to retrieve the bodies of civilians, from the streets or from 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 remarked.

Body bags and fuel for vans taking part in the evacuations were paid for either by the volunteers themselves or with donations, but not by authorities.

Lyubov was still searching 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?'".

In practice, the official turned his laptop screen towards her and immediately she recognised her deceased 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 mum's face and an old jumper. It she wore while she worked.

She had provided a DNA sample in January but was informed it had been lost, so her mother's body had been in the mortuary unidentified for a number of months.

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

She is bitter that the administration failed to stop the incursion, that it did not evacuate residents when it could, and that it persuaded them the situation was not serious.

For context, the command of Ukraine's Territorial Defence Forces and Ukraine's human rights commissioner of Ukraine remarked all the civilians they had evacuated from Kursk region had been handed over to Russia.

Lyubov thinks back to when she applied to ride her bike throughout the border into Ukraine to shop for sausages, yarn and ice cream.

Taken together, the developments around russians seek answers over hundreds missing after Ukraine' s 2024 incursion point to a situation that is still moving, and the coming days should bring more clarity.