An elderly woman evacuated from the border area of the Kursk region waits to receive humanitarian aid at a Russian Red Cross station in Kursk, 10 September. Photo: EPA-EFE/STRINGER
The Russian Red Cross has received over 5,000 missing person inquiries in the southwestern Kursk region since the Ukrainian incursion began in August, state-affiliated Russian news outlet RBC reported on Friday.
Anzhelika Rudenko, a Red Cross employee working in the Kursk region, told the outlet that the Red Cross had so far managed to reunite about 800 people with their families.
Rudenko added that the number of applications may exceed the number of people missing as multiple relatives could be looking for the same person.
The numbers given by the Red Cross differ from the figures provided by Russian authorities earlier this week, with Kursk Governor Alexey Smirnov saying on Monday that the Russian law enforcement had received only 770 missing person reports, including group requests from businesses that lost contact with their employees, since August.
Smirnov added that some 268 people had been found when Russian forces retook settlements in the Korenevsky district in late August.
The nonprofit organisation Liza Alert, which searches for those who have gone missing, received 779 missing person requests in the Kursk region from 7–20 August. Of those cases, 111 had been closed with the persons in question being found alive, a press spokesperson told state-affiliated business daily Vedomosti in August.
Liza Alert had published photos and data of missing persons in the early days of the incursion, but on 16 August announced that it would cease to do so due to increased cases of fraud.
Ukraine launched its surprise incursion into the Russian Kursk region in early August, aiming to create a “buffer zone” to protect Ukraine’s own border regions, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said at the time.
