Blocking out negativity: how refugees became a taboo subject in Kursk Oblast, the Russian region hardest hit by the war

Nikolay Skrynnik, a refugee from Sudzha, ran for the Kursk Oblast Duma with one goal: to force the authorities to listen to residents of the border areas affected by the war. But two weeks before voting began, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), which had nominated him, forced him to withdraw. The party leadership was unhappy with his criticism of Kursk Oblast Governor Alexander Khinshtein and United Russia: Skrynnik openly stated that the current authorities had turned their backs on the problems facing the border areas.

Skrynnik’s withdrawal became the culmination of an almost two-year campaign to push the issue of Kursk refugees out of the public sphere. 7x7 examined how the authorities’ methods of suppressing activists have evolved and found out who is still speaking out.

“They nominated me, then sidelined me”

Nikolay Skrynnik is a 75-year-old refugee from Sudzha. Before retiring, he worked for the police and later as a lawyer, defending people’s rights. In 2022, when the war in Ukraine began, he launched a Telegram channel called ZPobedu Nikolay (Nikolay for Victory), where he posted news and his own commentary. When the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) entered Kursk Oblast in August 2024, Nikolay left for Kursk. He began criticizing the authorities’ treatment of residents of the border districts.

Skrynnik told 7x7 that the refugees’ problems began in the first days of the AFU advance. On August 7, the region’s former governor, Alexey Smirnov, signed a decree under which residents of the border districts were granted the status of “victims of AFU shelling.” But residents, including Skrynnik, sought something different: recognition as victims of the hostilities and occupation, the return of land plots that had been taken from them or compensation for their value, payments for unregistered houses and extensions, and other measures.

“Hundreds of appeals were sent to every government, regulatory, and oversight body, and all we received were boilerplate responses. Although, given that mine was not the only voice speaking out, we did manage to achieve some things. Just not the main thing,” Nikolay told 7x7.

He wrote to the parliamentary parties asking them to adopt a federal law granting special status to residents of the border areas affected by the AFU incursion. All of them remained silent except the LDPR. Party chairman Leonid Slutsky arranged a meeting between an initiative group from Sudzhansky District and Alexey Tomanov, coordinator of the LDPR’s Kursk Oblast branch. Slutsky also promised to work on addressing the concerns of border-area residents in the State Duma.

The LDPR leadership’s responsiveness appealed to Skrynnik, and in April 2026, he joined the party. The last time he had joined a political party was almost a quarter of a century earlier, in 2002, when United Russia was formed. But after seeing that the party did not protect the interests of “working people,” he became disillusioned and turned in his party card a year later.

In June, the LDPR leadership in Kursk Oblast invited Nikolay to run for the regional Duma representing the border districts of Sudzhansky and Belovsky. He agreed without hesitation.

“If I won, I would have a real opportunity to be heard and to actively participate in lawmaking,” Skrynnik explained to 7x7.

What Skrynnik did not expect, however, was censorship of his social media posts. Immediately after his nomination, Alexey Tomanov, the LDPR leader in Kursk Oblast, began reprimanding the candidate over his statements and asking him to delete critical posts, particularly those targeting Governor Alexander Khinshtein. In one such post, Skrynnik admitted that the Kursk Oblast governor had disappointed him.

“<...> A year ago, we elected a governor. A young, energetic truth-seeker, a fighter against corruption, a defender of the people’s interests. <...> Why am I disappointed with my own decision to cast my vote for him? It’s simple: he turned his back on the problems facing residents of the border areas affected by the [AFU] incursion and the occupation of a vast territory. In fact, since June of last [2025] year, issues related to solving these problems have disappeared from the agenda of government meetings. Sensing that the governor had lost interest, officials became brazen <...>,” Skrynnik wrote.

On his MAX channel, which has almost 600 subscribers, Nikolay reported that Tomanov had been pressuring him for a month while facing pressure himself from the party’s federal leadership. He told Skrynnik that if he “didn’t settle down,” it could hurt the entire Kursk Oblast branch of the LDPR.

“I couldn’t stop fighting <...> To be honest, I categorically refused [to censor my social media], but then I realized: even if I were elected, how could I work on the same team as people who want me to lose and are forcing me to withdraw from the race?” he told 7x7.

According to Skrynnik, the post about Khinshtein was “the last straw for the authorities.” On September 1, the candidate gave in: he went to the election commission and withdrew from the election.

“Of course, I was upset about withdrawing. Not because I didn’t become a deputy. I was upset because I was betrayed, and perhaps even sold out. I don’t know in whose interests or on what terms. But I made the decision [to withdraw] consciously, as a protest against this betrayal. I was also afraid for my family. Politics is a dirty business. Anything can happen,” Nikolay said, explaining his decision.

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Skrynnik believes that the party leadership and the authorities may have been alarmed by the popularity of a candidate representing refugees. They did not want him to outperform United Russia candidate Nikolay Volobuyev, head of the Belovsky District. Volobuyev is known for receiving a personal phone call from Putin while he was in the hospital following a drone attack and later being awarded the Order of Courage. In April 2026, he also received the municipal Service Award from the president personally. He does not participate in debates or write about the fate of refugees on social media.

“They nominated me, then sidelined me. Why? Because they couldn’t allow even the possibility that a United Russia member <...> personally decorated by the president might not be elected. That’s the whole story,” Skrynnik said.

Another advocate for refugees’ rights, Vasily Ilyin, a deputy on the Novoivanovka Village Council in Sudzhansky District, was also kept off the ballot. Ilyin spent 240 days in occupied territory, helped fellow residents evacuate, and later supported them at protests. Contrary to expectations, A Just Russia did not include Ilyin on its party list. According to the Telegram channel Kursk Nightingale Is Building a Cozy Nest, United Russia members backing Nikolay Volobuyev allegedly pressured the federal leadership of A Just Russia.

A 7x7 journalist analyzed public statements by other candidates for the Kursk Oblast Duma and found that none of them are raising the problems facing the border areas. The only registered candidate who has previously spoken about refugees is Vladimir Sinelnikov, who is running on A Just Russia’s party list. Since the beginning of the AFU incursion, he has compiled lists of missing residents from occupied settlements and provided residents and media outlets with information about the lives of people under occupation. In his election campaign, however, he speaks only about healthcare and the rehabilitation of war veterans.

The cases of Nikolay Skrynnik and Vasily Ilyin show that the problems facing residents of Kursk Oblast’s border areas remain an extremely sensitive issue for the authorities, especially ahead of the election. By pushing activists who openly speak about the plight of refugees out of the race, officials are ultimately depriving affected Kursk residents of a place on the official political agenda. This is the main outcome of the authorities’ and security forces’ two-year campaign against those seeking fair compensation.

What are residents of the border areas demanding from the authorities, and what problems are they facing? Click to find out

Arrests, alienation, censorship: three fronts in the crackdown on dissent

Kursk Oblast’s security and administrative apparatus has built a system for suppressing protest activity among refugees that operates on three fronts. The first is direct coercive control: detaining and intimidating activists. The second is symbolic alienation: officials ignore residents during official commemorative events. The third is an information blockade: government-controlled media outlets exclude the problems facing the border areas from their coverage.

Coercive control

Open repression against refugees began on November 10, 2024, with the detention of Sudzha resident Andrey Gerasimenko. In his online group Sudzha. Free Announcements, he published a post inviting people to “get together for a fun and friendly walk on [Kursk’s] Red Square.” The post received 400 likes and 150 comments before Roskomnadzor blocked it. Subscribers responded to the call and gathered for a spontaneous rally. Gerasimenko was fined 20,000 rubles for organizing it. After that, Andrey disappeared from public view.

Four activists from Khomutovsky and Glushkovsky districts were caught up in a second wave of detentions in the spring of 2025. Roman Solodov, head of the Khomutovsky District initiative group and administrator of the Telegram channel Together We Are Strong!!!, published a schedule of meetings he planned to hold with local residents. He wanted to hear about people’s problems firsthand. After the first gatherings, Solodov wrote that he had not expected so many people to attend and stressed that he had not organized any rallies. Nevertheless, a court sentenced him to nine days in a special detention facility for violating the rules for organizing a public event. After his release, Roman abandoned his channel and ceased his public activities.

On the day Solodov was released from the detention facility, security forces detained Sergey Omelchenko from Glushkovsky District, who ran the Telegram channel and chat Glushkovo Uncensored together with his brother Valery. Residents used them to share information about shelling, destruction, and looting, including by Russian military personnel. A court found Sergey guilty of “disobeying police officers” and sentenced him to 12 days of administrative detention. In fact, he was targeted after suggesting that residents of the border areas meet with Olga Germanova, a State Duma deputy from Kursk Oblast, to discuss compensation.

The following day, police detained a refugee from the border areas named Sergey after he visited a United Russia reception office to sign up for a meeting with Germanova. 7x7 has no information about what happened to him afterward.

The fourth activist detained that spring was Valery Omelchenko. He had suggested that refugees record an appeal to Putin and supported his brother’s idea of going to meet with Germanova. At first, he was “taken away for a talk and a document check” and then brought to a police station, Sergey Omelchenko later said. Security forces detained Valery for violating the counter-terrorism operation regime, under which mass gatherings and calls to hold them are prohibited. The Omelchenko brothers subsequently stopped updating their channel. Sergey joined BARS-Kursk, a volunteer brigade created by the authorities to defend Kursk Oblast.

Despite the intimidation, Kursk Oblast residents continued to stage protests. Police detained Alyona Liskova, a refugee from Glushkovsky District, at a rally against the cancellation of monthly payments on December 8, 2025. She was released without a report being drawn up. In the spring of 2026, the prosecutor’s office threatened the administrators of a chat where refugees arranged meetings on Kursk’s Red Square with prosecution for “engaging in extremist activities.”

Commemorations without residents of the border areas

On the first anniversary of the AFU incursion into Kursk Oblast, Governor Alexander Khinshtein laid the foundation stone for a monument to the “heroes who saved civilians from AFU aggression.” Sources who spoke to the media outlet We Can Explain said that the authorities had neither invited refugees to the event nor announced it publicly. “It makes sense. [We] could have asked [Khinshtein] uncomfortable questions. It’s easier to ignore us on social media,” a resident of Glushkovsky District explained.

That same day, police prevented residents from holding their own commemorative event, titled A Displaced Person’s Home. People wanted to bring items they had taken from their destroyed homes to the Lenin monument. When the refugees arrived at the meeting point, security forces were already there. The residents decided not to take the risk.

On the second anniversary of the AFU incursion, officials led by Governor Khinshtein laid flowers at the Feat of Peaceful Hearts monument in front of cameras from federal TV channels. The event had not been publicly announced. The Telegram channel Kursk Nightingale Is Building a Cozy Nest reported that the authorities were looking for 50 “displaced persons” willing to attend the event and tell journalists that “they are living happily and everyone is supporting them.”

Silence on air

Censored media outlets in Kursk Oblast do not report on the problems facing refugees. Regional journalists do not attend the governor’s meetings with residents of the border areas or protests in central Kursk. Videos of the protests are filmed either by participants themselves or by journalists from independent media outlets.

7x7 found that in 2026, Kursk Oblast’s three main news agencies, Sekunda, Seim, and KurskCity, published nothing about refugees except stories based on statements from the governor, the prosecutor’s office, or other official sources.

When the AFU entered Kursk Oblast, the region was headed by Alexey Smirnov. In his Telegram channel, which he later handed over to the local operational headquarters, the phrase “internally displaced persons,” the term the authorities use for refugees, appeared 75 times between August 9, 2024, and December 5, 2024, when Smirnov was removed from office, or about four times a week. Most of these posts concerned meetings with residents or provided instructions on where to seek assistance.

We examined the same period, four months, and counted how many times the new head of Kursk Oblast, Alexander Khinshtein, mentioned “displaced persons.” The phrase appeared 54 times, an average of three times a week. From early May to early September 2026, Khinshtein wrote about “displaced persons” just eight times, mostly mentioning them in posts about federal funding for compensation.

Risk management: why the governor meets with refugees

After the first refugee protests in Kursk in November 2024, former governor Alexey Smirnov began holding public meetings with residents. In this way, he sought to calm protests that were outside the authorities’ control and give people a platform to voice their complaints about the government. Khinshtein continued the practice.

At one such meeting, the governor said he disagreed with placing most settlements on the “closed” list, meaning settlements whose residents receive compensation without their homes being inspected. Khinshtein proposed granting “closed” status only to places where 100% of homes had been destroyed.

At the same meeting, Glushkovo resident Ivan Gurov asked for his settlement to be added to the list guaranteeing residents housing certificates. Ivan also said that the Russian Armed Forces were not expanding the buffer zone, leaving Kursk Oblast’s border areas exposed to shelling. Khinshtein asked Gurov “not to assess the actions of the Russian Armed Forces.” A few days after the meeting, Gurov received a call from unknown individuals demanding that he register with a military enlistment office in St. Petersburg, where he was officially registered as a resident.

“They wanted to get rid of me, but it didn’t work: I’m officially registered in the settlement of Glushkovo <...> I was born and lived in Kursk Oblast, but some force emerged that prevented me from defending my home region <...>,” Ivan told the Telegram channel Kursk Nightingale Is Building a Cozy Nest.

The Kursk military enlistment office lost his file, preventing Gurov from joining the BARS-Kursk volunteer brigade. He eventually signed a regular military contract with the Russian Defense Ministry.

“Those meetings [between the governor and refugees] are mostly meant to show Moscow that, ‘Look, I’m not just sitting around doing nothing. I’m working,’” political scientist Abbas Gallyamov told 7x7.

Khinshtein has to meet with refugees at least once every six months to retain some leverage over residents’ discontent.

“Most governors follow the same logic. For them, publicity is a risk rather than a resource, so the best strategy is silence. For this kind of leader, a complaint that no one knows about does not exist: it requires no response, does not hurt the statistics, and sets no precedent. Khinshtein behaves differently, and that makes perfect sense if you remember that before becoming governor, he spent many years working specifically in information policy rather than building a career within the bureaucracy,” political scientist Dmitry Loboyko said. “He has a different understanding of risk: a closed system does not eliminate discontent; it allows it to build up. Eventually, it spills over anyway, only no longer on his terms, but on the terms of whoever is first to post a video of a protest. A three-hour meeting with a prosecutor promising to ‘look into it’ is not a loss of control, but a way to let off steam on his own terms. Here, the governor is not the one being held to account, but the person solving a problem created by someone else further down the chain.”

According to Loboyko, meetings with refugees help Khinshtein build his media profile among those observing the situation from the outside.

“Khinshtein is not selling the absence of a problem, but the spectacle of solving it. This is more costly and risky than simply remaining silent, but it works for a far broader audience than the few thousand people directly affected by the problem,” Loboyko said.

Who continues to speak out despite the taboo

The taboo surrounding the problems facing refugees in Kursk Oblast’s public sphere has led most initiative groups to disband or lose access to officials. Their members left government-created coordination councils because of censorship and their inability to resolve problems through direct dialogue. By September 2026, only a handful of activists still maintained their Telegram and MAX channels. Activity in the chats had also declined.

The remaining independent sources of information for people inside the region include the media outlet Pepel, designated a “foreign agent” in February 2025; the Telegram channel Kursk Nightingale Is Building a Cozy Nest, run by a former district deputy who keeps his identity secret; and local chats.

The only Kursk politician willing to speak openly about the situation in the border areas is Alexander Novikov, a Yabloko candidate for the State Duma. During debates, he repeatedly raised the issues of peace talks and a ceasefire.

“People are waiting for peace <...> Those [people] who stood in line [for humanitarian aid] without furniture, without food <...> Negotiations are impossible without a ceasefire, and so that young people can even have the opportunity to play sports, I propose three concrete steps toward peace. First: begin negotiations on a ceasefire. Second: form negotiating teams made up exclusively of emergency responders, human rights defenders, and volunteers. Third: involve independent countries in ensuring a ceasefire <...>,” Novikov said during one of the debates.

On his Telegram channel, the candidate criticized the work of the directorate responsible for issuing housing certificates. He also submitted an appeal to Russia’s Ministry of Social Protection over the cancellation of monthly payments to refugees and organized fundraisers for children from the border areas ahead of September 1, the start of the school year.

Kursk’s regional branch of VGTRK delayed airing Novikov’s campaign videos by two and a half weeks. Instead of August 26, they did not air until September 14. In the videos, Novikov urged Kursk Oblast residents to “choose peace and freedom.”

The day before early voting began in Kursk Oblast, the State Duma candidate announced that if elected, he would give his salary to residents of the border areas.

“For me, this is not a campaign slogan or a publicity stunt, but the result of hundreds of conversations with residents of the districts, many of whom earn less than 20,000 rubles a month,” Novikov wrote on his Telegram channel.

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