More than 350 residents of Russia’s southwestern Kursk region have been killed and nearly 800 remain missing following Ukraine’s months-long occupation of the border area, regional authorities said Tuesday.
“The fate of 789 residents of the border regions, including four children, remains unknown. There are 358 dead officially,” the Kursk region’s Prosecutor General Alexei Tsukanov said at a local roundtable.
Ukrainian forces captured dozens of towns in the Kursk region amid their surprise cross-border incursion in August 2024, marking the first time a foreign army occupied Russian territory since World War II.
More than 150,000 residents in the Kursk region were ordered to leave their homes, some of whom later staged protests over poor living conditions and what they described as inadequate government support and compensation for destroyed property.
Russia’s military said last month that it had completely driven out Ukrainian troops from the Kursk region with the help of North Korean troops.
Acting Kursk region Governor Alexander Khinshtein said at the time that the civilian death toll from the nine-month occupation stood at 288.
Neither Khinshtein nor Tsukanov provided details as to how the civilians died.
But Tsukanov said Tuesday that Russian military investigators have recorded 582 crimes allegedly committed by “Ukrainian nazis and their accomplices,” according to the Kursk region broadcaster Seym.
Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, at least 621 Russian civilians have been killed in Ukrainian attacks in the regions of Kursk, Belgorod, Bryansk, Rostov, Krasnodar, as well as annexed Crimea, according to authorities.
By comparison, the United Nations estimates that more than 13,100 Ukrainian civilians have been killed since President Vladimir Putin ordered troops across the border over three years ago.
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