KYIV, March 22 (Reuters) – When Mariia Pankova last exchanged messages with her close friend Pavlo in December, she had no idea that he was among the Ukrainian troops fighting in Russia’s Kursk region.
She found out when a fellow soldier told her several days later that her friend, Pavlo Humeniuk, 24, a combat engineer in Ukraine’s 47th Magura brigade, had gone missing near the village of Novoivanivka in Kursk on December 6.
Almost four months have passed and there has been no further information about Pavlo’s fate, Pankova told Reuters, citing her conversations with his relatives. She keeps searching on Telegram and Facebook hoping to find out whether he is dead or alive.
Pankova, 25, believes the cost of Ukraine’s risky incursion into Russia may have been too high. The sentiment is shared by many others in Ukraine, especially after troops retreated from most of Kursk this month following weeks of heavy fighting.
“I’m just not sure it was worth it,” she said, large teardrops running down her face when talking about her missing friend, who she bonded with over their shared love of hiking in Ukraine’s mountains.
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“We’re not invaders. We just need our territories back, we do not need the Russian one.”
In response to questions for this story, Ukraine’s armed forces General Staff said the offensive was meant to put pressure on Moscow, to divert Russian forces from other fronts and to prevent Russian cross-border attacks on neighbouring parts of Ukraine.
The operation “achieved most of its goals”, the General Staff said.
Kyiv’s assault on Kursk in August took Russia, and the world, by surprise. It was the biggest attack on sovereign Russian territory since the Nazi invasion of 1941.
As Ukrainian soldiers smashed into the Kursk region, largely unopposed, they quickly seized some 1,376 square kilometres (531 square miles) of Russian territory.
