More than 300 people still considered missing in Russia’s Kursk region — MyJoyOnline
More than 300 people are still considered missing in Russia’s Kursk region after Ukrainian forces entered the region in August 2024. This figure was cited by the governor of Russia’s Kursk region, an aggressor state, but the exact number of people with whom contact has been lost remains unknown. This was reported by MyJoyOnline.
According to Russian authorities’ estimates, about 2,000 people remained in settlements captured by Ukrainian military personnel. Lyubov, who is from the village of Darino in the Sudzhansky district, said she tried to persuade her mother to leave. According to her, her mother believed Russian state television reports claiming that the situation could supposedly be stabilized quickly.
Search for the missing
Relatives of people who remained in the combat zone created groups to search for information. One resident compiled a list of people she saw in videos by Ukrainian military personnel and journalists, and also collected data on those considered dead and possible burial sites.
At the beginning of 2025, Russia’s commissioner for human rights published a list of 517 residents of the Kursk region who had been reported missing. Relatives claimed that the list confused the names of the missing people with those searching for them. Lyubov sought help from the Red Cross and the Kursk internal affairs directorate, but said she received no response.
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Identifying her mother at the morgue
Intense fighting continued in Darino at the end of 2024, and authorities said that 90% of the village had been destroyed. After Russian military personnel regained control of the village, they began evacuating survivors and removing the bodies of the dead.
An evacuated resident told Lyubov that her mother died after a head injury under undetermined circumstances. In October 2025, at a morgue in Kursk, the woman identified her mother in a photograph of a body found in April of that year. Lyubov had previously provided a DNA sample, but she was told that it had been lost. The body remained unidentified for several months and was later cremated. Lyubov keeps her mother’s ashes in her apartment in Belgorod.
The command of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces and the Ukrainian commissioner for human rights stated that all civilians evacuated from the Kursk region had been handed over to Russia. The governor of the Kursk region, Russia’s commissioner for human rights, and the Russian Red Cross did not respond to a BBC inquiry about this story.
