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Ukraine Invaded Russia. Here’s What It Was Like for Civilians.
Russians in the area of Ukraine’s invasion have described seeing signs of violent encounters, as well as respectful treatment from Ukrainian troops.
Anatoly KurmanaevHaley WillisEkaterina BodyaginaOleg Matsnev and Dmitriy Khavin
Reporters and video journalists interviewed nearly 20 Russian civilians and reviewed videos posted by Ukrainian and Russian soldiers, as well as photographs and satellite imagery, for this article.
The drone flying over Korenevo village, in the Kursk region of Russia that Ukraine invaded in August, recorded a grisly scene: at least seven bodies lying on the road, most of them in civilian clothes.
Destroyed cars were scattered on the roadside, some with corpses in them. One man lay entangled with a red bicycle. Some bodies had decomposed so badly in the summer heat that they had to be identified by their teeth, according to a volunteer who helped recover the remains.
The video and photographs that captured the scene were taken in the early days of Ukraine’s offensive, the first invasion of Russian territory since World War II. The area was heavily contested by Russian and Ukrainian troops, with weapons fired in both directions, so it is impossible to determine who was responsible for the deaths with available information.
But the Korenevo casualties represent the clearest known example of the toll on Russian civilians of Ukraine’s seizure of territory in Kursk. They also highlight the unexpected position Ukraine is in — an invading and occupying force for the first time in two and a half years of war.
Since Ukrainian forces made their surprise incursion into western Russia over two months ago, the experience of ordinary Russians has been difficult to gauge. Cellphone towers have been destroyed, making it hard to reach residents. The region is largely closed to independent reporters, and propaganda has dominated news coverage, as both Russia and Ukraine have reasons to play down the human toll.
Through verified video, satellite imagery, photographs and testimony from nearly 20 Russians who lived in the area, The New York Times has compiled a detailed snapshot of how Ukraine’s invasion unfolded for civilians. Some of those contacted willingly spoke for attribution; in other cases, The Times is using only their first names because of security concerns.
Civilians who went to the scene in Korenevo after Russian troops had pushed out the Ukrainian forces described the remnants of chaotic and violent encounters.
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“Every car that approached that place was shot at,” said the volunteer, Maria Skrob, who helped take bodies to a morgue in the provincial capital. “Everyone was trying to get out, but as you can see, they did not succeed.”
Eight bodies were visible in drone footage and photographs. Ms. Skrob described remains that had become unrecognizable in the heat and said that, overall, 15 bodies were recovered at the site, a figure that could not be independently confirmed.
She asserted in an interview that Ukrainian soldiers had shot at fleeing civilians in Korenevo, but did not cite any evidence. Residents of a nearby village, Kurilovka, also claimed Ukrainian forces had shot at fleeing civilians. Ukraine has denied the accusations, and neither claim could be independently verified.
Residents said periodic Ukrainian shelling in previous months, and a lack of warning from local officials, led many local residents to ignore the signs of approaching battle and remain home until it was too late.
A Korenevo resident named Olga said she was sitting down to a meal with her family when they heard explosions. “Korenevo descended into hell,” she said in a phone interview. “No one came to evacuate us, no one told us to leave.”
As local officials fled, residents took it upon themselves to evacuate those most in need. But by Aug. 10, Russian soldiers still in Korenevo had told a volunteer, Ivan Naumov, that it was too dangerous to stay.
“Poking your nose there is pointless — it’s in gun sights,” Mr. Naumov, a firefighter, told the other volunteers in a voice note reviewed by The Times. “It equals death.”
He told the others to avoid crossing a bridge over the Krepna River into Korenevo’s eastern suburb.
The bodies were later discovered near the bridge described by Mr. Naumov.
The Russian government has not provided detailed information on the deaths in Korenevo. The Ukrainian military, in a statement, dismissed descriptions or accounts of the deaths as Russian propaganda.
The Ukrainian invasion creates a moral burden for the government in Kyiv, sociologists and military analysts say. In Kursk, Ukrainian soldiers found themselves assessing threats from real and imagined spies and saboteurs, and overseeing thousands of citizens of a nation that has destroyed swaths of their homeland.
The Ukrainian military is now under scrutiny to uphold the same rules of war that Russian invaders have broken thousands of times in Ukraine — with executions, torture, rape and the forceful removal of Ukrainian children to Russia, as documented by Ukrainian and international prosecutors.
Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s human rights commissioner, has insisted that his country would adhere to humanitarian laws. “We are different,” he said in an interview shortly after the incursion. “It’s the main argument for our international partners to provide assistance.”
The Ukrainian military said in statement it had committed “no recorded cases of violations” of the Geneva Conventions in Kursk.
To support its claims, Ukrainian soldiers and officials have released videos showing their forces delivering food and water to residents of occupied towns.
Ukraine set up a military administration in Kursk in August to provide humanitarian aid, law and order and basic services in the occupied land. A spokesman for the Ukrainian military authority in Kursk, Oleksiy Dmytrashkivsky, told Agence France-Presse on Sept. 18 that “several thousand” civilians remained in the Ukrainian-controlled area at the time.
But the government in Kyiv has provided few other details about the work of the occupation authority, and Mr. Dmytrashkivsky did not respond to interview requests.
The accounts that civilians provided present a mixed picture of Ukraine’s record in Kursk.
Some Russians said they safely passed Ukrainian soldiers as they fled on the first day of the invasion, Aug. 6.
“I nearly brushed against them on the road,” said Sergei, a Korenevo resident, describing his encounter with Ukrainian armored columns. “For some reason no one shot at me.”
The Times spoke to three people who had escaped to safer areas but managed to talk to family members who stayed behind. They described fairly benevolent treatment.
One elderly man said Ukrainian soldiers had brought him fresh bread and canned meat. Platon Mamatov, a Russian soldier and blogger, said he found signs of ongoing daily routines during his drone sorties over the occupied territory, including footage of a woman working in her garden and a man drawing water from a well.
There were also signs of harsher treatment.
In one video verified by The Times, two Ukrainian servicemen taunt an elderly Russian man on a road outside the occupied town of Sudzha. “You’re a Russian swine,” one Ukrainian soldier says in mock German.
Another Ukrainian soldier in the video wears a World War II-style helmet with SS markings. Some units in the Ukrainian military have displayed Nazi imagery, in some cases ironically because Russia has portrayed Ukraine as a neo-Nazi state to justify its invasion.
Videos posted by the Ukrainian military and verified by The Times show strikes being carried out in residential areas. In some of those videos, Russian soldiers are visible entering the buildings before they are hit. In most cases, it is not possible to determine whether civilians are present.
These attacks have destroyed or damaged residential housing and infrastructure.
Russian forces have also shelled residential areas as part of their counteroffensive against the Ukrainians in Kursk, according to videos verified by The Times.
In the village of Kurilovka, residents claimed that Ukrainian soldiers shot and killed fleeing civilians.
Those reports of shootings in the region are particularly hard to verify as the fighting continues. While there is sometimes visual evidence that civilians were killed, it is not clear by which army.
In Kurilovka, at least four civilian cars came under automatic gunfire in the early hours of the invasion, according to phone interviews with survivors and their relatives. One passenger, a 28-year-old pregnant woman, Nina Kuznetsova, died from the gunshots, according to her sister and husband, who was in a different car that he said also came under fire.
Another resident, Aleksei Trubitsyn, 28, died minutes earlier on the same road in an explosion that destroyed his car, according to his sister Kristina.
A group of Ukrainian soldiers approached Mr. Trubitsyn’s mother as she tried to recover his body from the wreckage, Kristina said. The soldiers said Mr. Trubitsyn’s car hit an anti-tank mine, without specifying which army placed it there.
In Korenevo, on the other side of Ukrainian-controlled territory, an analysis of satellite imagery confirms that most of the cars and victims appeared along the street from Aug. 10 to Aug. 14. It is unclear whether all of the deaths resulted from the same episode, though Ms. Skrob, the volunteer, said the people died in an ambush on Aug. 11.
On Aug. 17, Mr. Mamatov, the Russian blogger, recorded drone footage of the bodies and later posted it on social media, providing the first visual record of the deaths.
Ukrainian commanders had instructed their units to treat civilians humanely, according to soldiers involved in the Kursk operation. Members of the 61st Mechanized Brigade were told to “avoid conflict” with civilians and “provide assistance as doctors would,” said Lt. Col. Artem Kholodkevych, the brigade’s deputy commander.
But as Russia intensifies efforts to regain territory, so do the risks to civilians, military analysts said.
In the meantime, a group of about 250 Kursk residents has been pressuring the Russian and Ukrainian governments, to no avail, to provide passage to safer places for nearly 500 relatives who lack basic services as the weather worsens.
“At what cost will we get the town back?” said Tatiana Mozgovaya, whose husband remains in Sudzha. “The impression is that no one cares about the people who are left there.”
Reporting was contributed by Constant Méheut, Yurii Shyvala and Nataliia Novosolova from Kyiv, Ukraine, Alina Lobzina from London and Thomas Gibbons-Neff from Providence, R.I.
Anatoly Kurmanaev covers Russia and its transformation following the invasion of Ukraine. More about Anatoly Kurmanaev
Haley Willis is a Times reporter with the Visual Investigations team, covering conflict, corruption and human rights. More about Haley Willis
Dmitriy Khavin is a senior video editor with the Visual Investigations team. More about Dmitriy Khavin
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