The Russian authorities reported this Thursday that the incursion launched in 2024 by the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Russian region of Kursk, bordering Ukraine, would have caused the death of 640 civilians and left another 561 injured, according to their latest official balance.
"In August 2024, the Ukrainian Armed Forces illegally invaded Russian territory in the Kursk region and occupied several dozen settlements," denounced the official spokesperson of the Russian Investigative Committee, Svetlana Petrenko, in a statement from the agency in which she criticized that, "feeling emboldened and aware of the impotence of the civilian population, Ukrainian nationalists and mercenaries from various countries violated International Law and committed serious, and especially serious, crimes on a massive scale."
The spokesperson detailed that, as a consequence of these "brutal actions of Ukrainian militants, 640 civilians died and 561 were injured," while referring to specific cases such as the rapes and sexual assaults against eight women who were later murdered, as well as damages recorded in more than fifty sites classified as cultural heritage.
"To date, investigators, forensic experts, and specialists have inspected 186 settlements in the Kursk region," Petrenko indicated, specifying that "the damages caused by the actions of the Ukrainian armed groups amount to almost 505 billion rubles," equivalent to about 5.4 billion euros.
According to the Investigative Committee, so far the Russian authorities "have opened a total of 711 criminal cases for these incidents, 706 of which are related to terrorist attacks." According to the same source, "more than 300 criminal cases have been concluded and the courts have convicted 280 militants."
The agency for which Petrenko works continues to analyze the facts related to the Ukrainian military offensive of August 2025, framed in the war initiated by Russian President Vladimir Putin in February 2022.
During that operation, the Ukrainian forces managed to control around 1,200 square kilometers and more than a hundred localities in the area. Moscow was then forced to divert resources from the front in Ukrainian territory to expel the troops that had settled in Kursk, which contributed to the conflict in Ukraine entering a phase of stagnation, with combat lines practically frozen.