Authorities in the southwestern Kursk region said on Tuesday that two men were killed after they stepped on a mine near the border with Ukraine.
Acting Kursk region Governor Alexander Khinshtein identified the two victims as men aged 38 and 28, but did not give out their names. He said the men entered a mine field near the village of Popovka, around 25 kilometers (15 miles) north of the Russian-Ukrainian border.
Khinshtein said both died at the scene of the mine explosion. The governor urged civilians to exercise “extreme caution” given the dangers posed by unexploded ordinances throughout the Kursk region’s border areas, where Ukrainian forces staged an incursion last August.
Russia’s military said in April that it had cleared the region of all Ukrainian forces following a successful counteroffensive, during which North Korea sent thousands of its own troops to help Moscow.
Russia began clearing mines from the recaptured areas of the Kursk region in March, a process that authorities say could take more than a year.
Last week, Khinshtein said a state media camera operator was hospitalized after being wounded in another minefield explosion near the border.
Nikolai Ivanov, who represents the Kursk region in Russia’s lower-house State Duma, said last month that life has become “even more difficult than during the occupation” due to ongoing Ukrainian air attacks.
“It feels like the Ukrainians are taking revenge on us, civilians, for their defeat in Kursk,” Ivanov told the RTVI broadcaster. “People die almost every day in different areas of the Kursk region.”
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