Hundreds Still Unaccounted for After Ukraine’s 2024 Kursk Incursion, Families Struggle for Answers

In August 2024 Ukrainian forces briefly seized parts of Russia’s Kursk region, overrunning about 777 sq km, seizing checkpoints and taking around 40 prisoners. The governor now estimates over 300 people from the area remain missing, though the true number is uncertain. Local volunteers, including Yuri Tkachev, have created a register of roughly 1,000 individuals seen in video footage, trying to track deaths and burials, while official lists released by the Russian human-rights commissioner mixed missing persons with searchers, angering families.

Lyubov, whose mother vanished during the fighting, wrote to the Red Cross and interior ministry without reply, eventually locating her mother’s unidentified body in a mortuary after a DNA sample was lost. The body was cremated, leaving the family without a proper burial. Appeals for a humanitarian corridor to evacuate civilians have gone unanswered, and both Russian and Ukrainian officials have declined comment.