Russian evacuees from Kursk reunite with their families

An evacuee reacts on meeting a relative at a Russian military checkpoint west of Kursk.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Russian pensioner Olga Shkuratova trembled, clutching a scrap of paper bearing a handwritten phone number for her son.

She had not spoken to him in the seven months that she was trapped by Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region cut off from the outside world.

Ms. Shkuratova was on a Russian evacuation bus after Moscow’s forces took back her village of Goncharovka and much of the land Ukrainian forces had seized in a riposte against Russia’s three-year military campaign in Ukraine.

Just last week, the 62-year-old had to bury her husband in the couple’s garden.

He was killed in a strike during fierce fighting that ensued when Russian troops begun ousting Ukrainian troops from the border area.

“I’m alive! I love you!”, she shouted down the phone to her son, who lives more than 1,000 km away in a region north of Moscow.

A volunteer came to calm her down.

Since last week, Russia has moved several hundred civilians from zones it has recaptured from Ukraine in the Kursk region to safer areas east of the main town, Sudzha.

Images of Sudzha released by Russia after battles to retake it show rows of houses destroyed and a town centre badly damaged, with rubble littering the streets.

The Kremlin has presented Moscow’s fast military offensive in the area as a major success. But the fact that no civilian corridor was created in the Kursk region sparked anger towards the authorities, mostly from relatives of those trapped.