At least 77 Russian conscripts were killed during Ukraine’s Kursk incursion, investigation finds

At least 77 Russian conscripts — not to be confused with contract or mobilised soldiers — were killed in the Kursk region during the Ukrainian army’s cross-border operation in August 2024, and roughly 30 more went missing, according to a new joint investigation from independent outlets Important Stories and Verstka.

Journalists spoke with eight conscripts who were stationed along the border in the Kursk region when Ukraine launched its incursion, as well as relatives of five other soldiers. Additionally, they examined more than 50 videos of prisoner-of-war interrogations posted by Ukrainian bloggers, as well as other open-source evidence.

According to iStories and Verstka, a total of 344 conscripts were stationed along the Ukrainian border in the Kursk region in 2024. Seventy-seven of them were killed during Ukraine’s incursion, and more than 30 disappeared. The journalists believe the missing soldiers may also be declared killed soon. Authorities are still searching for their bodies.

The conscripts who were killed were between 18 and 25 years old, with most of them in their 20s. A plurality of them were from the Komi region (42 out of 344), while more than 10 of them each were from Dagestan, Bashkortostan, the Yamalo-Nenets autonomous district, the Altai region, the Tyumen region, Kabardino-Balkaria, and the Krasnoyarsk region.

According to Important Stories, in some units, conscripts made up 50–85% of personnel.

The Ukrainian project I Want To Live reported that about 500 Russian conscripts have passed through prisoner exchanges, and that there are currently no conscripts captured at the border still being held in Ukrainian captivity. Some of the conscripts who were exchanged were later sent back to the border, to the Bryansk region, where they spent more than a month.

In March 2022, Vladimir Putin promised publicly that conscripts would not be involved in combat, a prospect already forbidden by Russian law. Nonetheless, from the war’s first days, there have been reports to the contrary.