How many Russian civilians are living in Ukrainian-held parts of the Kursk region? Moscow won’t say — so we used open sources to estimate
The Ukrainian military’s cross-border operation in Russia’s Kursk region has been going on for nearly two months now. After Ukraine’s offensive stalled and Russian troops launched a counterattack, the situation on the ground got even more complicated. With the front line constantly shifting, it’s now difficult to say with certainty which settlements are under Ukrainian control and which are under Russian control at any given point. Even harder is determining how many people were unable to evacuate and remain in the combat zone. The Russian authorities haven’t revealed this information (and it’s possible they don’t have it), while the Ukrainian authorities have vaguely reported that “thousands” of Russian citizens are living under Ukrainian control. Meduza examined the available demographic data about the Kursk region, compared it to documentary evidence of the fighting there, and created a map to estimate how many civilians may still be in the conflict area.
This article focuses solely on the situation regarding civilians in the parts of Russia’s Kursk region that are currently under Ukrainian control. Over the last two and a half years, the Russian army has partially occupied multiple Ukrainian regions. Millions of Ukrainian civilians have been forced to live under Russian occupation, flee their homes for other parts of the country, or become refugees abroad.
On September 18, Oleksiy Dmytrashkivsky, a spokesman for Ukraine’s military administration in the Kursk region, said that there were “several thousand” people living on Russian territory under Ukrainian control. “In some villages there are more than 100 [people], some have more than 200, and some have over 500,” he told AFP.
The Russian authorities haven’t published information about the number of people living under occupation; they’ve only released statistics on the number of people who’ve been forced to relocate. The last time they did this was on September 11, when Kursk Governor Alexey Smirnov said about 150,000 people had fled the conflict zone.
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It’s likely that even Russian officials themselves don’t have precise information about the number of people now living under occupation in the Kursk region. At the same time, we do know the number of requests people have made to the government asking for help finding missing family members in the region: on September 23, Governor Smirnov said that his administration had received 770 such appeals since the beginning of August. In the same statement, the governor said that 268 people had been found on territories reclaimed by Russia in its counteroffensive. Given that he said less than half of these people (118, or 44 percent) had been mentioned in search requests from relatives, we could conclude that the real number of Russians still in areas currently occupied by the Ukrainian Armed Forces is as many as 2,000. However, this estimate relies entirely on Smirnov’s claims — which aren’t necessarily reliable.
To get a more accurate estimate of the number of civilians still living on territories affected by the fighting, we compared the most recent available data on the Kursk region’s demographics with verified information about who controls which territories. This information comes from Meduza’s project for collecting and analyzing geolocated videos, which also form the basis of our regular battlefield updates.
The map we created divides settlements in the Kursk region into five categories:
- Settlements still under Ukrainian military control
- Settlements that have returned to Russian control following Russia’s counteroffensive
- Settlements located within 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) of the contact line or state border (or otherwise vulnerable to artillery fire and drone strikes)
- Settlements where an evacuation order is in place
- All other settlements
According to Russia’s 2010 census, which was the last one to include data about each individual settlement, the Kursk region had 2,629 cities, towns, and villages with at least one resident. That same year, the region’s total population was 1,127,081. By early 2023, that number had decreased significantly; in the Korenevsky and Glushkovsky districts, which Ukraine’s offensive has targeted, the population had dropped by 20–30 percent compared to 2010.
To account for this change without losing the information about specific areas, we estimated the 2023 population of each town and village by assuming the decrease was uniform across all settlements. This assumption is almost certainly inaccurate, as people tend to leave sparsely populated villages for larger towns, but the distortion is less severe at the district level and is acceptable for the purpose of aggregating population data by territory.
It’s also important to note that past census data, of course, can’t tell us how many people currently remain in these areas. What it can do, though, is provide an upper limit for this number and a sense of the overall scale of how civilians were affected by the fighting.
The 2,000 civilians we estimated are currently living under Ukrainian control based on Governor Smirnov’s statements can be viewed as a minimum estimate of the true number. At the same time, the 23,000 people who lived in the settlements now captured by the Ukrainian army as of 2023 represent the maximum estimate. The range between these numbers is vast, but this is the little that we know objectively at this point.
