Over 200 civilians reported missing in Russia’s Kursk region amid week-long AFU incursion

No fewer than 200 Russian civilians have been reported missing from villages in Russia’s southwestern Kursk region, amid the continuing incursion into Russian territory by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Russian independent news outlet Agentstvo reported on Sunday.

A spokesperson for Russian volunteer organisation Liza Alert, which searches for missing people, told the publication that while the group was unable to “give an exact figure”, it could say for sure that it had received over “200 requests in the past two to three days”.

Liza Alert began receiving missing person reports on Wednesday, the day after the Ukrainian incursion began, according to Agentstvo, adding that the organisation had posted 71 missing person alerts from the Sudzhansky and Korenevsky districts, which border Ukraine and where most of the fighting has been reported over the past week, as well as from the regional capital Kursk.

Efforts to locate the missing are also underway on the Russian social media site VK, Agentstvo reported, saying that there had been 148 missing person posts in one group on the Russian social media giant alone.

On Sunday, Artem Sharov, a representative of the Kursk region’s Ministry of Emergency Situations, reported that over 8,000 civilians had left the Kursk region’s border areas between Saturday and Sunday.

Since the start of Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk, 106 civilians have been injured, according to Russian Health Minister Mikhail Murashko, speaking to state-owned news agency TASS on Sunday.