KURSK, Russia -- One Russian man refused to leave his border-region home until it was hit with an explosive, and then he and his wife jumped into a neighbor's car to escape.
Another gave up on being evacuated and crawled into a forest, spending two days avoiding land mines and aerial drones before hitching a ride to the city of Kursk. Another woman cried as she waited at a humanitarian aid point in Kursk itself.
"I'm quite honestly very surprised by what's happening. It seems like we don't abandon our own and all that, but here are several thousand [Russian] soldiers in captivity now and now Russian territory is occupied," said Misha, a 35-year-old mechanic who was standing outside a humanitarian aid distribution center. "This is not what I expected when the war began."
Eight days into their stunning invasion -- the largest incursion into Russian territory since World War II -- Ukrainian forces continue to expand their operations the southwestern region of Kursk, which shares more than 150 kilometers of border with Ukraine.
Nearly 1,000 square kilometers were believed to be under control of Ukrainian troops as of August 14, as Russia's military and security forces scrambled to contain the advances.
Civilian authorities, meanwhile, have struggled to handle the flood of people evacuated, or fleeing, from their homes. As many as 120,000 people were reported to have fled the Ukrainian advances; many have ended up in Kursk, the regional administrative center, whose prewar population was about 440,000.
And a growing number of those said they were frustrated with how officials -- all the way up to President Vladimir Putin -- have responded to the growing crisis.
'We Left Under Fire'
At a distribution center for humanitarian aid in Kursk on August 9, groups of people -- many of them evacuees -- milled about, along with riot police trying to keep order as some tried to grab at supplies being unloaded and distributed by volunteers.
"We left under fire, at the last moment," said one woman who gave only her first name, Natasha, and said she was from the village of Korenevo. "My husband didn't want to leave, he kept saying, 'This is my home, I am a man, I will protect it.' We heard tanks and went outside to look at them. A second later, there was nothing left to protect: Either a missile or drones hit the house."
Natasha said she and her husband jumped into a neighbor's car and sped away from Korenevo, located about 28 kilometers from the border.
"The whole sky was buzzing already, we were flying at some crazy speed. I closed my eyes, grabbed the [door] handle and we got here just like that," she told RFE/RL.
She nodded toward a neighbor who had fled in the same car and was standing nearby, crying.
"Everyone is on edge," Natasha said, adding that the other woman had missed out on a piece of humanitarian aid and was also upset by TV reports downplaying the severity of the situation.
"I have two children, I was given three pillows, and there weren't enough for her," she said. "Then in the evening, she saw on television how it turns out that everything is fine here, we are 'keeping our spirits up,' 'holding on,' and 'feeling the support of the whole country and the president.'"
"The support of the country is more than enough, we don't need the support of the president," Natasha said of Putin. Asked to explain, she said: "What's he to us? It's too bad that 'one shouldn't vote for him' became clear [only] when they started shooting at us."
Standing not far away, Misha, a mechanic from Bolshoye Soldatskoye, a village 30 kilometers from the border, described how days earlier, he had requested help in evacuating but gave up after getting no response and went into a nearby forest to hide.
"I realized there would be no evacuation. Maybe the evacuation trucks had already been destroyed," said Misha, who did not want his last name published. In the forest, he saw drones overhead and worried he would be targeted.
"There were mines in the forest. Dark green and brown petals. I had to walk very slowly. If you step on one, you're out a foot, then you have to crawl," he said. "On the first day, I was hoping to find something to eat, but there was nothing. On the second day I thought I'll eat frogs; it had just rained, there were a lot of them."
After at least two days, he said, he heard cars honking on a road, and he flagged down a ride to Kursk.
He said he was frustrated because early on after the launch of the all-out invasion in February 2022, Russian authorities had said the operation would be over quickly and that Russian forces would "liberate" Ukraine's Donbas region -- a reference to Kremlin propaganda that falsely asserted the Donbas was being illegally occupied by Ukraine's government.
At the beginning, he said, "I thought we would quickly liberate the Donbas, incorporate it into Russia, and that would be that. But then there was more, it turned out.
"Some people talk about Kherson, some talk about Odesa," he said, referring to other regions of Ukraine that Russian forces have targeted. "But 'salvation' has now reached the stage where we need to save the Kursk region. My house needs to be liberated now."
'Why Is Everything Happening So Ineptly?'
Olga, a 50-year-old woman who lives in St. Petersburg, said her mother, Lyudmila, does not want to leave her home in Kursk, even though city services are slowly shutting down.
"My mother says today almost all buses and trolleybuses stopped running, and trams -- only taxis [remain]. There are water shortages again," Olga told RFE/RL by telephone from St. Petersburg.
"My mother thinks nothing terrible is happening," she said, adding her mother thinks the situation closer to the border -- such as in the town of Sudzha, which Ukrainian commanders have claimed -- is not as bad as it is being portrayed.
"She thinks everything is too exaggerated about Sudzha," Olga said. "She says: 'This is deliberately being whipped up on the Internet to scare us.'"
Natasha, the woman from Korenevo, said for many of those who have been evacuated, there is palpable frustration with how both the humanitarian situation has evolved, not to mention the entire war.
"I understand everything…. Why is everything happening so ineptly?" she complained.
She pointed to a spate of high-profile corruption investigations in recent months that have targeted top Defense Ministry officials, as well as past reports that Russian soldiers had looted Ukrainian homes of toilets in the early months of the invasion.
"Generals are being jailed. There's no end in sight to the war. It turns out that there are only thieves there, in our army," she said. "Maybe the theft of toilets isn't fake, either?"
