The head of one local village council, Yuri Tkachev, was among the volunteers who went to collect the bodies of civilians from the streets or nearby fields.
“It is difficult for people to know – or rather not know – what happened to their loved ones, whether they were in captivity or died, and where they died,” he said.
The body bags and fuel for the vans involved in the evacuation were paid for either by the volunteers themselves or through donations, but not by the authorities.
Although regional officials met with the missing persons team several times in the second half of 2025, relatives complained that it made little difference.
Lyubov was still searching for her mother’s body until she visited the morgue last October during a trip to the regional center of Kursk.
“I simply 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 she immediately recognized her deceased mother in the photo taken in April 2025.
She was lying on her side on the street with her knees bent. Love tried not to look closely. She recognized her mother’s face and the old sweater she wore while she worked.
She provided a DNA sample in January but was told it had been lost, so her mother’s body lay unidentified in the morgue for months.
She wanted to bury her mother in her native village, but this is not yet possible, so she was cremated, and her ashes are in Lyubov’s apartment in Belgorod, about 100 miles away.
She is upset that the government failed to stop the invasion, that it did not evacuate residents when it could, and that it convinced them that the situation was not serious.
Neither the Kursk governor, nor the Russian human rights ombudsman, nor the Russian Red Cross responded to the BBC’s request for comment on this story.
The command of the Territorial Defense Forces of Ukraine and the Commissioner for Human Rights of Ukraine stated that all civilians they evacuated from the Kursk region were handed over to Russia.
Lyubov remembers how she rode a bicycle across the border with Ukraine to buy sausage, yarn and ice cream.
“We went to them, and they came to us. And now none of these villages exist anymore.”