What Happened to Russian Conscripts in Kursk in 2024 — and Afterwards

On the night of August 5-6, 2024, the Russian soldiers stationed near the Russian-Ukrainian border in Kursk Oblast heard military vehicles moving. They reported the suspicious activity across the border to their headquarters, and in the morning, they got an order to send two men on a reconnaissance mission to a neighboring platoon stationed closer to the border. Maxim and his comrade — both conscripts — volunteered.

When they almost reached their destination, they saw two vehicles in the forest belt: "We thought those were two ‘UAZ Hunters’ and headed over there, [thinking our platoon was there].” We heard an unintelligible shout from there, and then shooting started.

“After that, everything was like slow motion,” Maxim recalls. “My fellow soldier turned toward me, and I saw three bullets hit him in the head. I just fell onto the asphalt, looked at my comrade’s body, and realized there was no way to help him. The first thought that crossed my mind was that this was a dream, that it wasn’t real. And then I came to my senses when they started shooting at me.”

*****

Maxim’s fellow soldier is just one of dozens of young conscripts who died as a result of the Ukrainian incursion campaign into Kursk Oblast. IStories and Verstka have counted at least 77 conscripts who died in the region’s border zone in 2024. As of this publication, over 30 more remain missing. It is likely that over time they will also be officially recognized as dead. According to our data, in 2026, Russian authorities have been still registering the deaths of conscripts who went missing two years ago.

IStories and Verstka have spoken with surviving conscripts and relatives of those who served on the border, analyzed open sources, and reconstructed the course of events in the Kursk Oblast in August and September 2024.

How the conscripts ended up at the border

Starting in late March 2024, the conscripts drafted in the autumn began arriving at the border in the Kursk Oblast. At some locations, they replaced the demobee conscripts — those approaching the termination of their service. “We learned from them that there’s nothing much going on there, but you’re sitting at point zero, at the ‘ribbon’ [front line], so you see the enemy, and they see you,” Nikita Litvinyuk recounted after being taken captive by the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF). “You stay still and so do they.”

At a military unit in Klintsy, Bryansk Oblast (where the 488th Regiment is stationed), the soldiers were assured that they would be stationed behind the border guards and contract soldiers. “To be honest, I was happy because I knew it would be a bit more relaxed than at the unit,” said a captured conscript. “At the unit, they push us hard: marching, drills, all that stuff. But everyone says it’s calm at the border — nothing too demanding, you just sit around, go on guard duty, and that’s it.”

Some of the people involved in the events in Kursk had other motivations: for example, Ruslan told us that he deliberately volunteered to be sent to the border, and at first, his commanders were reluctant to send him there. “There’s nothing to do at the unit, and nothing interesting there,” Ruslan explains. “I wanted to join the army and really understand what it’s all about.” When asked about the risks of serving at the border, he replied: “I wasn’t particularly worried. I had thought [the Ukrainian forces] might advance, but not the way it actually happened.”

Some of the conscripts did not tell their relatives that they were serving right at the border. “It turns out they only found out in September, when I returned [from captivity],” Andrei told IStories. “All that time, I’d been saying that I wasn’t there, that I was 40 kilometers away.”

Sometimes the conscripts’ commanders went along with this cover story. “My mom would call them and ask where I was. They’d say 'he is fine, he is in the unit', even though I was at the border. So they were lying, so it turns out,” said one of the captured soldiers. Some relatives tried to keep conscripts from being sent to the border. “They sent letters to the prosecutor’s office and to every possible authority,” Eduard Shulz told. “But [the commanders] sent us anyway. They said there weren’t enough people, enough mobilized soldiers and contract soldiers.”

The training level of the conscripts varied significantly. According to one of our interviewees, at the training unit they had been trained intensively for four months, were taught to utilize various types of weapons, and were trained to identify drones by sound. Another conscript recalls that even instructors from the Russian Army's elite Special Operations Forces were brought in to help with the training. At the same time, there were conscripts stationed at the border who, by their own account, had only fired a few bullets at a basic training course.

The conscripts' daily routine at the border was almost identical. They served at strongpoints — well-fortified underground facilities with a network of tunnels and observation posts. The soldiers would dig trenches and build dugouts, and they regularly went on guard duty.

Contract soldiers and mobilized troops — reservists drafted due to the war — also served alongside them, but in much smaller numbers. According to our interviewees, conscripts made up the majority at many positions, accounting for 50 to 85 percent of the personnel.

The beginning

Nikolaevo-Daryino

Nikolaevo-Daryino is a border village five kilometers west of Sverdlikovo, where by August 6, dozens of conscripts had already been under daily shelling for several days.

Around 1:00 a.m. on August 6, the conscripts defending two strongholds near Nikolaevo-Daryino heard military vehicles moving near the very border. Then came a barrage from all types of weapons: mortars, “Grad” multiple-launch rocket systems, FPV drones, and UAVs carrying mines. By the morning, when everything had quieted down, the Ukrainian military vehicles had already passed the Russians’ border positions.

Maxim and his late fellow soldier were unknowingly walking toward them. According to the conscript, it was there that he “saw death up close for the first time.” Once the shock had worn off, Maxim turned back and found himself in a wheat field: “It seemed to me that if I stood up in the middle of the field and ran, they wouldn’t notice me. I was just starting to get to my feet when several bullets whizzed past my head again. In the end, they set the wheat field on fire with a drone. I kept crawling; the field was quite large — almost a kilometer. As I was reaching the edge of the field, the fire was already a meter away from me. There was a gully, so there I stood up and started firing roughly in the direction of the forest belt from which they’d been shooting at us. I put my rifle on safe and tumbled down that gully.”

Maxim ran back to his position and reported his fellow soldier's death to the commander. “He was in a state of shock himself,” recalls the conscript. “He kept asking if he’d misheard me, then started contacting the headquarters. He said, ‘Fucking hell, I’ve already suffered casualties.’ And the headquarters commander was like, ‘Calm the fuck down! Pull your shit together, you bitch.’ And the connection cut out. Then the headquarters commander gave us the order to launch an assault — and there were only seven of us.” Maxim convinced everyone that heading toward the border was dangerous, so he stayed at the strongpoint with his fellow servicemen.

On the third line, in the village of Nizhny Klin, there was stationed a medical platoon. It was mostly made up of conscripts. As one of them told IStories, the nighttime artillery barrage did not affect them, but around 7 a.m., the soldiers heard gunfire and put on their gear. “There were no specific orders, so we had to improvise. The commanders weren’t prepared for such situations either,” our interviewee recalls. The conscripts and the platoon command abandoned their positions and took cover in the forest.

The 30th Artillery Brigade's position was located 10 km from the border, in Novoivanovka. Following the Ukrainian advance, nine conscript artillerymen would be listed as missing in action; five of them were later declared dead. Their official date of death is August 6, 2024. It is likely that their position became a priority target and immediately came under fire from the Ukrainian Army.

First POWs

The Sudzha border crossing point

One of the most heavily fortified strongholds was the Sudzha international road border crossing: several buildings that in peaceful times had been used by the border service to inspect the vehicles crossing the border.

According to one of the captured soldiers, only the conscripts, along with their commander, were stationed on the front line, right at the border. They did not receive the order to retreat from the border toward the Sudzha crossing point until the evening of August 6. Вy then, the shelling had lasted all day, and more than 50 people had gathered at the crossing point — conscripts from the “Oleshnya-2” position in a neighboring village had arrived there that same evening. It was ordered not to surrender the point, and the soldiers were denied evacuation.

The next morning, Ukrainian forces launched an assault on the checkpoint. “The first wave was more or less over, then came the second. That was it — nothing was left of the facility except for a concrete room,” one of the soldiers recalled. He said the conscripts were loading magazines for the border guards, who were firing back at the advancing Ukrainian troops.

“We were sitting in some small room in the very center,” another conscript recounted. “There was essentially nothing left around us. And the tank firing at our left and then at our right. We knew that if it hit us directly just once or twice, it would be a mass grave right there.”

“Someone said, ‘Count the shells — the tank can’t keep firing endlessly,’” recalled a captured soldier. “So I counted them.” The shelling continued for about an hour; the fifteenth shell hit the room where the wounded were lying, and they were trapped under the rubble. After the sixteenth shell, the surviving officers decided to surrender, and, on the evening of August 7, several dozen people were taken captive, according to videos published on Ukrainian media.

Sverdlikovo

Just seven kilometers to the north, the Sputnik stronghold — which was also mostly filled with conscripts — ended up surrounded quickly. The UAF were not attempting an assault. “They were just shelling us to keep us from sticking out,” the conscripts’ commander, Major Bykov, told. “The company commander contacted us, and I asked if he knew anything. He said, ‘There's no communication with the higher [command], none at all.’”

After several days of shelling and negotiations with the Ukrainian forces, Bykov convinced his comrades to abandon their position without a fight. According to him, a total of 29 people (including 23 conscripts) from Sputnik surrendered.

The next day, August 10, the Ukrainian Armed Forces launched an assault on the second stronghold, Styk (“Junction”), near Sverdlikovo. Until then, a group of conscripts had been stationed there in relatively calm conditions, reinforced by mortar crews who had retreated from near Daryino. According to IStories estimates, at least four conscripts may have been killed during the Styk assault on August 10.

Some of the survivors, following orders from the senior staff officer, managed to withdraw to the third strongpoint, “Moscow.” There, Captain Kuzmenkov’s troops held their ground until August 14. After several assaults, he also resolved to surrender: “When there are no other options left, the choice is to sacrifice the men or try to save their lives. Maybe at my own expense. But I think their mothers will be grateful.”

Oleshnya

According to our estimates, the heaviest losses — at least 15 people killed or missing — were suffered by conscripts holding positions near the village of Oleshnya.

Similar to other locations, the shelling there began as early as August 2–3. “At night, they started bombing everyone; we couldn’t do anything at all — we just sat there. Then they started shelling us with artillery, it seemed,” recounted a conscript from the Oleshnya-2 stronghold. “A radio message came through saying they’d taken over all of Oleshnya-1 and were heading our way.” The commander ordered the conscripts to withdraw to the Sudzha crossing point, where they faced the major offensive there.

At least four conscripts were killed near Oleshnya on the second day — August 7. Mikhail Zelensky and two other soldiers managed to escape from their position and reach a command post further back from the front lines. However, Ukrainian troops had already taken up positions there. Zelensky and his comrades hid in a wooded area and did not leave it.

Magomed was one of the conscripts stationed at Oleshnya and killed during the operation. According to his relative, Magomed’s position was attacked on August 6. The command ordered the soldiers not to leave the strongpoint and promised to send in reinforcements, but no one except a zampolit — political commissar, an officer responsible for indoctrination and morale issues — arrived at the position. Later, in a conversation with Magomed’s family, the officer claimed that he had to abandon the conscript and two other soldiers at the strongpoint in order to save a group of 22 conscripts. According to the conscripts who broke out of the encirclement, Magomed and his comrades managed to retreat to Gogolevka, where they were killed by a grenade explosion in a dugout.

Another captured conscript shared a similar story about the zampolit who had arrived at the border. They and the border guards split into four groups and headed for Gogolevka. On the morning of August 7, Ukrainian troops attempted to capture one of the groups. In the firefight, the conscript said, nine people were killed, and only three survived.

On the run

Small groups of conscripts with some border guards and a handful of officers among them went on to hide in the forests for weeks and would be captured by the Ukrainian military almost daily until the end of August.

Andrey from the Vologda Oblast told IStories that he spent about six days in the forest with other soldiers. The conscripts would drink swamp water and eat grass, nettles, and rowan branches. “Nettles actually taste the best,” says Andrei. “Rowan branches have a soft tip at the end. You can chew on that, too.” Some conscripts were luckier, if near the forests where they hid there were sunflower or soybean fields.

Sergey Yershov and another soldier split from their medical platoon in Nizhny Klin and spent more than 50 days in the woods. In late September, they made their way to Russian troops, after which the conscripts were sent to a hospital. The medical platoon where Yershov served had surrendered on August 12. One of his fellow soldiers told IStories that he had returned to Russia via a prisoner exchange as early as August 24.

On the eastern flank, where the 252nd Motorized Rifle Regiment was holding the line near the villages of Plyokhovo and Borki, the Ukrainian troops broke through the border as well, but were unable to advance further. The retreating conscripts wandered through the forests and swamps for several days, being hit by artillery fire and drones, one of them, Alexander, told us.

Finally, on August 14, they made it to Borki, where a local resident sheltered them: “He was quite an interesting character. As far as I could tell, he hadn’t left because he was on a drinking bender. He brought us whatever food he had at home, and some water to drink. Getting water was really hard: all we had was water from the outdoor shower, and also from a bathtub that had been filled.”

By that time, Ukrainian troops had already taken over the village. Alexander and his sergeant kept an eye on the vehicles passing by the house, noting down the coordinates on a piece of paper and texting them to their command: “They would strike those pickup trucks with drones, and those houses the Ukrainians stationed in as well.”

A few days later, the water in the tub was gone, so the soldiers removed the water heater and took apart the pipes to drain the remaining water from there. Meanwhile, the homeowner was cruising around the village on a scooter looking for alcohol. “This is a guy who doesn’t care what’s going on around him; all he wants is to find some moonshine,” Alexander says. “The Ukrainian soldiers had to warn him: ‘Don’t ride here. It’s mined; don’t go there.’”

The soldiers took turns on duty, and spent the rest of their time reading the books in the house. By the time active fighting reached Borki, there was hardly a single building left intact in the village.

“They started searching the houses, just in case someone had slipped through,” the conscript recalls. “I was in the annex at the time [on duty], with no ballistic vest and no helmet. I mean, what was the point?? We were in the middle of nowhere with God knows how many of them around. I just put my rifle on the ground and sat down. They opened the door, and there I was, just sitting. They were very surprised and said, ‘Don’t make any sudden moves; everything will be fine.’ And then they started searching the whole house.”

The Ukrainian soldiers told Alexander and the other captives that one of the conscripts had shot himself: “We had a conversation [with the soldier who shot himself] about how you mustn’t [surrender],” says Alexander.

The captured Russians were given food and cigarettes. “When [the Ukrainian soldiers] realized that we were conscripts and that we’d been stuck here for about a month, they were surprised and said, ‘Wow, you guys are tough,’” Alexander recalls.

Veseloye

In mid-September, the Ukrainian Armed Forces broke through the border in Kursk Oblast once again, this time about 30 km west of the existing front line. Despite the fact that the incursion had been going on for over a month, recent Russian conscripts from Airborne Forces units were still stationed at the border positions. Later, those of them taken captive explained that, officially, they were located at a training ground in Pskov Oblast, not in the combat zone.

A new Ukrainian offensive in another sector of Kursk Oblast was faced by Russian conscripts from the 234th Airborne Assault Regiment, the 217th Parachute Regiment, and the 1140th Artillery Regiment.

In the first days of the Ukrainian breakthrough in the Glushkovsky District, at least eight Airborne Forces conscripts were killed. Some of them were likely stationed at a rural school building in Veseloye, 3.5 km from the border, according to their relatives' posts on social media.

According to the “Russian Spring’s War Reporters” Telegram channel, the school building was destroyed by a U.S. precision-guided air bomb. The UAF unit Khorne Group published a video of the strike. Our estimates indicate that the total losses among conscripts in this area of the front may have exceeded 20 people since August 2024.

Capture, exchange, and demobilization

Andrey, a conscript from Vologda Oblast, recounts that he was taken captive after several days in the woods. “They brought me to some house. There, some Ukrainian women started bandaging my wounds again. The whole time, they kept saying that I had come onto their land, that I was killing their children, killing their husbands, that ‘you’re all so bad, but we’re still helping you — although we could have abandoned you,’ Andrei recounts their conversation. “I told them I was defending my country. I didn’t set foot on your land. I was on my own.”

Conscripts who were taken prisoner were called in for interrogations, another interviewee told us. “Some would be called in and tell everything — absolutely everything: the positions, the roles, — he says. — Sure, they were threatened and beaten, but there were no bruises, the specialists know how to beat people with no bruises. But I was lucky. I once wandered into the SBU [State Security of Ukraine] office by accident. They decided to interrogate me, and when they found out where I worked [as a train attendant], they asked, ‘Do you know anything about Metro-2?’ [the secret tunnels under Moscow intended for the country’s leadership]. I said, ‘Well, I just know stuff from books,’ — and that seemed funny to me. They said, ‘Why are you laughing? Face down on the floor, or we’ll beat you up right here!’” However, they didn’t do anything, and the conscript was released.

Several conscripts we managed to speak with describe the conditions in captivity as satisfactory. “The food wasn’t anything special — it was just what the other prisoners there ate. There were Ukrainians in the same prison as well,” says Alexander.

“They did feed us, but the food was not tasty at all,” Yevgeny recalls. “The tastiest thing we had there was bread. Since it’s warm there and trees grow, we would pick apples — we made a stick to reach the trees through the bars.”

“At one point, I was afraid [I would be tortured],” recalls Andrei. “The guys in the cell next to me said they would try to make them speak Ukrainian. They’d say something to me in Ukrainian as well, and I was supposed to answer, but I didn’t understand it and played dumb. I thought something [some kind of punishment] would follow. When I realized that they don't punish you, don’t even do anything of the kind, I understood that I was in a normal prison. Everything settled down for me, so I totally stopped being afraid.”

Two weeks after the incursion into Kursk Oblast began, on August 24, the first POW exchange took place, and 115 conscripts returned to Russia. They were seated on a bus and sent to the Belarus border. According to our interviewees, no one knew their destination until the very last moment: the prisoners thought they were being taken to some sort of a special settlement.

After returning to Russia, the wounded soldiers were sent to a hospital, but one of the men we spoke to refused to go there. “The guys I thought had died turned out to have been taken captives; they were exchanged along with me. I couldn’t bear to be separated from them for even a week,” Andrey explains. “Lying above me was my buddy, whom I thought had died, but he survived. To my left lay another buddy who had survived. I was so happy that they were alive, I didn’t need any hospital.”

After “investigative procedures” and a medical examination in Moscow, the soldiers who did not require hospitalization were reassigned to military units. There, they served out the remainder of their terms (six to eight weeks) and were then discharged, the conscripts who returned from captivity told us.

According to one of them, some of the conscripts who went through the exchange were then sent back to the border in Bryansk Oblast. They spent more than a month there.

The aftermath

The prisoner exchanges went on into 2025. In April, Mikhail Zelensky and the conscripts captured in the Glushkovo area came back to Russia. “I Want to Live” — a Ukrainian government project established for the Russian soldiers to willingly surrender into captivity — informed the IStories and Verstka that about 500 conscripts have been exchanged. Two years after the Kursk Oblast operation, none of the Russian conscripts remained in captivity.

On April 26, 2025, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov reported to Vladimir Putin about the “crushing defeat suffered by Ukrainian armed formations” in Kursk Oblast. The search for the bodies of the fallen conscripts and their extraction only became possible after Russian troops reached the border again.

The mother of a soldier who is still considered missing in action told us that her son’s body was never found at the position near Sverdlikovo. “I periodically call Rostov-on-Don [where the bodies are identified at the Center for Reception, Registration, and Transfer of the Deceased]. There’s been no DNA match,” she says. “[They say that] it’s impossible to carry out a recovery there — drones are flying, and the area hasn’t been cleared of mines.”

Conscripts listed as missing in action were being officially declared deceased one by one throughout 2025. The last known case of a status change occurred in May 2026 — nearly two years after the soldier’s death.

In total, at least 77 conscripts were killed in the first months of fighting in Kursk Oblast. According to IStories and Verstka's estimates, about 30 more people are still considered missing in action.

Life after the war

Alexander says that before his mandatory military service, he was seriously planning to sign a military contract [to go to war against Ukraine voluntarily], as he was “really eager” to. “But my mother is a very anxious person, and we agreed that I would serve my mandatory service first, and then, if I hadn’t changed my mind, I could sign a contract,” Alexander explains. “When I came back after all of that, of course, I thought about it for a long time; the officers were encouraging me to sign. For better or for worse, but I changed my mind.”

“The effects of the concussion haven’t gone away even though it’s been two years,” Mikhail tells us. “Emotionally, all [feelings] are gone. All that’s left is aggression. Maybe a little joy sometimes. It only takes a split second to set me off — and that’s it, I explode. It’s very hard to control all of this.”

According to Mikhail, his hearing was severely damaged. “I always wear an earbud — at least one — with music playing constantly,” he says. “There’s a very loud ringing [in my ears], and it won’t go away.” Mikhail has not received any government assistance, so he is currently paying for his treatment out of his own pocket.

The mother of one of these conscripts also told us that some of them have not received any support from the government. “His concussion was so severe that he was almost unconscious when he was taken prisoner,” says Ekaterina. “When he came home from the army, he practically refused to talk to me. He would just lie in bed, turned away. We spent a year struggling to get him recognized as a combat veteran because there were no documents on him. The documents were restored, and he underwent treatment, but his condition wasn’t recognized as a combat-related injury. He now suffers from constant high blood pressure, headaches and insomnia. I’m currently paying for all his treatment out of my own pocket.”

Some conscripts face similar difficulties in receiving the payments they’re entitled to for the injuries and participation in the “counterterrorism operation zone” (the CTO in Kursk Oblast was declared on August 10). “Until I went to the prosecutor’s office, they didn’t want to pay me the regional [injury compensation],” says Andrey.

“I didn’t receive my combat veteran status until December of 2025,” says Timur. “I haven’t received any payments for the days I spent in the CTO zone. I’m still working through these issues with lawyers.”

“It was specifically the 18th Battalion [of the 488th Regiment] that didn’t get a single ruble," Egor explains. “The guys who served in other units received decent payments. They paid the demobilized soldiers from our unit — who had already left long ago by August — but they didn’t pay us. We’re basically not counting on it anymore.”

According to other conscripts, they “weren’t wronged financially” — with the money from the government, some were able to buy a car or a plot of land to build a house. Andrey used the compensation he received to buy an apartment in his hometown and started a business with a fellow soldier. “If it weren’t for [the journalists’ questions], I wouldn’t even have remembered about the army time,” he says. “I used to go crazy at night. New Year’s Eve, fireworks — that’s it; I’d hide in some basement listening to them. Well, yeah, my mind goes into overdrive at night sometimes. Things just get scary in my head. You wake up covered in sweat.”

Andrey calls his experience serving in the army “a school of life.” “I come home, look at my uniform, and remember: it turns out I really was there. I became physically fit there, maybe more experienced, and started looking at things with a more mature perspective,” Andrey reflects. “You remember a lot of good things. We get together with our fellow soldiers and have fun — and everything’s great. We remember our jokes. Then we remember those who can no longer be here to hear those jokes. As the saying goes, we started by toasting to their health and ended by toasting to their rest in peace. Overall, it’s good that I’m here, on my own two feet, with both arms intact — everything’s fine, and I’ve got my head on my shoulders. Fate is such a thing: what if I hadn’t been in the army? Or, let’s say, what if things had turned out just a little differently? I probably wouldn’t be standing here. That’s just how things turn out, and sometimes it’s strange.”