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 said.
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.
Although regional officials met the group searching for the missing several times in the second half of 2025, relatives complained it made little difference.
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?'”
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, which she wore while she worked.
She had provided a DNA sample in January but was told it had been lost, so her mother’s body had been in the mortuary unidentified for several 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, about 100 miles away.
She is bitter that the government failed to stop the incursion, that it did not evacuate residents when it could, and that it persuaded them the situation was not serious.
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.
The command of Ukraine’s Territorial Defence Forces and Ukraine’s human rights commissioner of Ukraine said all the civilians they had evacuated from Kursk region had been handed over to Russia.
Lyubov thinks back to when she used to ride her bike across the border into Ukraine to shop for sausages, yarn and ice cream.
“We went to see them, and they came to see us. And now not one of these villages exists any more.”
