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More than two years after Ukrainian forces pushed across the border into Russia’s Kursk region, dozens of local families are still grappling with unanswered questions, overwhelming grief, and growing resentment toward the Russian government over its failure to support efforts to locate their missing loved ones.

The 2024 incursion, which saw Ukrainian troops seize over 777 square kilometers of Russian territory over six days, was launched as a strategic maneuver to divert Russian military resources away from Kyiv’s frontline offensive operations. Within days, Ukrainian forces captured two key border checkpoints, took roughly 40 Russian prisoners, and struck a military convoy, holding control of the Sudzha district and surrounding areas for eight months. During that period, most mobile and internet connectivity across the occupied zone was completely cut off, leaving family members who had fled the fighting with no way to contact relatives who chose to stay behind.

For many residents who remained in the captured settlements, the choice to stay came after years of heavy messaging from Russian state media. Lyubov, a local woman whose 75-year-old mother stayed in the village of Darino, says she repeatedly begged her mother to evacuate, but state television propaganda convinced her the incursion would be over in days and everything would quickly return to normal. “State channels kept telling viewers everything was under control, that it would all be sorted out in two or three days,” Lyubov recalled. “My mother believed them, and she refused to leave.” Russian officials estimate around 2,000 civilians stayed in the settlements that fell under Ukrainian control.

As fighting dragged on and Russian forces launched counteroffensives to retake the territory by late autumn 2024, desperate family members stepped in to do what government agencies had not. A group of more than 100 relatives penned a joint letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the United Nations requesting a dedicated humanitarian corridor to evacuate trapped civilians, but no such corridor was ever established. Left with no official support, the families formed independent search groups, compiling their own lists of missing residents, cross-referencing names with footage published by Ukrainian media and the military, and documenting reported deaths and burial locations. By the time the collective list grew to nearly 1,000 names, it remained a purely volunteer effort.

Multiple requests for official help went unanswered. Lyubov says she reached out to both the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Kursk regional interior ministry with appeals for information about her mother, but never received a single response. In early 2025, Russia’s federal human rights commissioner released an official list of 517 reported missing Kursk residents, but the document was so riddled with errors that it mixed the names of missing people with the names of the relatives searching for them. Outraged families called the botched list a slap in the face to grieving loved ones, with one young woman who lost both parents posting online that the publication represented “the height of incompetence and a total lack of basic respect” for affected families.

After Russian forces retook Darino village in late 2024 – where officials confirm 90 percent of structures were destroyed in heavy fighting – they began evacuating surviving civilians and recovering the bodies of those who did not make it. An evacuee from Darino eventually reached out to Lyubov with devastating news: her mother had died several weeks earlier from an untreated head injury, one of multiple elderly residents who perished after being trapped in harsh wartime conditions. But for months, Lyubov still had no way to locate her mother’s remains, as officials repeatedly told her the area remained too dangerous to search for missing bodies.

Even volunteer recovery efforts have been left to self-fund. Yuri Tkachev, a local village council head who joined volunteer body recovery missions, says volunteers and private donations cover all costs for body bags, fuel, and transportation – authorities have provided no financial or logistical support. While regional officials held multiple meetings with the search group in the second half of 2025, relatives say the talks yielded no tangible change or support.

It was not until last October that Lyubov finally got an answer, during a trip to the regional capital Kursk. When she asked about unidentified bodies matching her mother’s description, a mortuary official pulled up a photo from April 2025. Lyubov immediately recognized her mother’s face and the old wool jumper she wore for gardening. Lyubov had submitted a DNA sample to authorities back in January to help identify remains, but officials told her the sample had been lost – meaning her mother’s body had gone unidentified in the mortuary for six months. Unable to bury her mother in the destroyed village of Darino, Lyubov had her cremated, and her ashes now sit on a shelf in Lyubov’s apartment in Belgorod, roughly 100 miles from her mother’s former home.

The BBC reached out to the Kursk regional governor’s office, Russia’s human rights commissioner, and the Russian Red Cross for comment on the families’ allegations, but none responded to requests. Ukrainian officials, including the command of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces and Ukraine’s human rights commissioner, say all civilians evacuated from Kursk by Ukrainian forces have already been transferred back to Russian authorities.

For Lyubov, the loss of her mother has transformed her long-held faith in the Russian state into open resentment, a rare stance in a country where public criticism of the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine is heavily suppressed. She still remembers a time when border life was peaceful: she would regularly cycle across the border into Ukraine to buy groceries, yarn, and ice cream, visiting with neighbors on both sides. “We went to see them, they came to see us,” she said. “And now not one of those villages exists any more.”

Local officials have publicly stated that more than 300 people remain unaccounted for in Kursk, but independent search organizers say the true number of missing civilians is almost certainly higher, with no centralized, accurate official database to confirm the full scale of the crisis.

A devastating Russian aerial attack on Ukraine’s Black Sea port city of Odesa has reduced the family apartment of top Ukrainian professional tennis player Dayana Yastremska to rubble, marking the latest incident of Russian strikes destroying Ukrainian athletes’ residential properties amid the ongoing full-scale invasion. In a series of emotional social media posts shared over the weekend, the 26-year-old athlete condemned the attack, pointing to the destruction as a stark example of what Russia’s so-called “Russian world” ideology brings to Ukrainian communities.

Yastremska confirmed that the residential building was struck directly by a Russian Kalibr cruise missile, accompanying her announcement with raw photos showing the multi-story building engulfed in flames after the impact. Amid the charred rubble and collapsed structural remains, the athlete documented one unexpected surviving item: an official orange clay-court towel from the 2025 Roland Garros Grand Slam tournament in Paris, left hanging intact amid the destruction.

Calling the survival of the tennis towel eerily symbolic, Yastremska wrote on her official Instagram account Saturday: “A Russian missile destroyed our apartment in Odesa… SYMBOLIC. A piece of world tennis survived a Russian missile. Our home did not.” She also called on the two global governing bodies of professional tennis—the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) and International Tennis Federation (ITF)—to see the damage through the eyes of Ukrainian athletes, writing: “@wta @itf_reviews Look at these images through our eyes.”

Regional officials confirmed the human cost of the coordinated overnight strike that hit Odesa and the nearby coastal town of Chornomorsk Friday. Odesa regional governor Oleh Kiper reported that 37 people were injured in the attack, including an infant, while two additional residents remain unaccounted for as of Saturday.

This attack is not an isolated incident for Ukrainian athletes. Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, multiple Ukrainian sports figures have seen their residential properties damaged or destroyed in Russian missile and drone strikes. Last year, for example, Heorhiy Sudakov, a star midfielder for Ukraine’s national men’s football team, reported that his Kyiv apartment was heavily damaged in a Russian drone attack while his wife and young child were inside the home at the time.

Currently ranked 113th in the WTA women’s singles world rankings, Yastremska is one of Ukraine’s most successful active tennis players, most recently advancing to the semifinal round of the 2024 Australian Open. She most recently competed at the 2026 US Open in New York earlier this month, where she was eliminated in the tournament’s first round.

A massive overnight fire that sparked multiple secondary explosions has broken out at a private ammunition storage facility owned by Bulgarian defense contractor EMCO near the central Bulgarian village of Gorni Varpishta, leaving no casualties in its wake, and prompting an official investigation into the cause of the incident with sabotage at the top of the list of potential causes.

Gorni Varpishta sits roughly 170 kilometers east of Bulgaria’s capital city Sofia, and EMCO officials confirmed in an official statement that the facility had been inactive for several months ahead of the fire. The site also passed a full regulatory inspection just 20 days before the blaze, with inspectors confirming full compliance with all safety protocols. That finding, company representatives say, rules out any possibility of the fire being caused by human error.

Bulgaria’s Interior Minister Ivan Demerdzhiev confirmed that law enforcement and national security officials have not ruled out the possibility of outside interference, while EMCO has gone further, explicitly framing the incident as the latest in a long string of coordinated sabotage attacks targeting Bulgarian defense sector entities stretching back to 2011. “As the EU and Nato member state most severely affected by such actions, Bulgaria must join the collective effort to prevent and neutralise these attacks,” the company said in its public statement. The firm did not directly name a potential perpetrator, but context around the company’s operations points to a well-documented pattern of Russian interference targeting entities that supply arms to Ukraine.

EMCO is one of Bulgaria’s most prominent private defense firms, and its weaponry has been regularly supplied to Ukrainian forces fighting to repel Russia’s full-scale invasion launched in 2022. The company is owned by prominent Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev, who Bulgarian prosecutors have confirmed was the target of a foiled Russian assassination plot more than a decade ago. In 2015, Gebrev, his son, and another EMCO employee were poisoned in an attempted killing; three Russian nationals were later charged in absentia for the crime by Bulgarian authorities.

This latest fire at an EMCO facility comes just one month after another blaze and series of explosions hit a separate EMCO ammunition warehouse in the same central Bulgarian region. It also aligns with what Western security officials describe as a dramatic escalation of Russian-led sabotage operations across European soil in recent months.

Just last week, German national security officials publicly confirmed that Russian intelligence was responsible for a drone attack on Leipzig Airport carried out in August, a claim Moscow has dismissed as “absurd”. Since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a wave of unexplained fires and blasts have hit defense-related facilities across the European continent, from Italy in the south to Estonia in the Baltic north. Multiple affected governments have directly attributed these incidents to Russian sabotage operations designed to disrupt arms flows to Ukraine.

Bulgaria, a NATO and EU member state that shares a border with both Ukraine and Turkey, has long been one of the most significant providers of legacy Soviet-style weaponry to Ukraine, much of which is compatible with Ukraine’s existing military arsenal. While the Bulgarian government recently paused state-owned arms shipments to Kyiv, private defense firms including EMCO continue to move weapons and ammunition to Ukrainian forces.

Four and a half years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the eastern European nation faces what a top United Nations official is calling its most challenging winter since the war began. With temperatures forecast to drop as low as minus 20 degrees Celsius, the country is in a desperate race against the clock to repair and reinforce its damaged power network before cold weather sets in, as renewed and intensifying cross-border airstrikes continue to target critical civilian infrastructure on both sides.

Alexander De Croo, head of the UN Development Programme and the UN’s third highest-ranking official, issued a stark warning during an on-the-ground interview with the BBC from Ukraine. He accused Russian forces of systematically targeting Ukraine’s energy and civilian infrastructure, a pattern of attack that he says puts millions of Ukrainian civilians at risk of a full-scale humanitarian catastrophe this winter. “This winter is going to be the toughest one since the war,” De Croo stated, adding that Ukraine enters the cold season from an already critically weak position. The former Belgian prime minister emphasized that there is no possible justification for the deliberate targeting of civilian sites, which have included not just energy transmission lines and power facilities, but also petrol stations, shopping malls, and commercial business centers.

De Croo’s warning comes amid a sharp escalation in aerial attacks from both Moscow and Kyiv that resumed just days after former U.S. President Donald Trump held diplomatic talks with leadership in both Russia and Ukraine. In recent weeks, Russia has ramped up its use of faster, harder-to-intercept jet-powered drones in near-continuous strikes across Ukraine, with the capital Kyiv facing particularly intense bombardment. On the Ukrainian side, Kyiv has launched repeated drone strikes deep into Russian territory, with most targeting oil and gas distribution facilities and commercial infrastructure.

Both sides have repeatedly denied intentionally targeting civilian populations and non-military infrastructure, despite mounting civilian casualties from the latest wave of attacks. Just this week, Ukrainian officials confirmed that five people were killed and another 67 wounded in a daytime Russian drone strike on a shopping mall in Pavlohrad, located in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region. Earlier in the same week, two separate Russian air strikes targeting shopping malls in Zaporizhzhia and Sumy left two people dead and 28 others injured. Additionally, two people were killed when Russian drones struck a border crossing between Ukraine and Moldova, a neutral country that has increasingly found itself pulled into the crossfire of the ongoing conflict.

Russia has also reported casualties from Ukrainian attacks this week. Overnight Wednesday, Russian officials said a Ukrainian seaborne drone strike on the Black Sea resort city of Sochi left 28 people wounded. Moscow also blamed three additional civilian deaths on Ukrainian attacks across border regions this week.

Against this backdrop of escalating violence, the United Nations Development Programme is leading international efforts to help Ukraine prepare for the harsh winter. Work is already underway to repair energy infrastructure damaged during last winter’s attacks, while the UN is also supporting the development of more decentralized, sustainable energy facilities that are less vulnerable to targeted airstrikes. Still, De Croo described the massive reconstruction effort as an almost impossible task, given the constant threat of new airstrikes that force workers to halt operations repeatedly during air raid alerts. “They are reconstructing these sites under constant, constant air alarms. And they know that they are working at a site which is a target,” De Croo said. “So you try to reconstruct, but part of your day you can’t work because it’s just too dangerous.”

In the worst-case scenario, widespread damage to Ukraine’s energy network would leave millions without access to heating during the deepest cold, and could knock out water and sewage systems across large parts of the country. De Croo warned that this level of disruption would create conditions that amount to a humanitarian catastrophe, with widespread human suffering that would extend across Ukrainian society.