Russia jails nearly 200 Ukrainian POWs on terror charges over Kursk offensive

The cases against the prisoners of war captured in the Kursk region are distinct from other terrorism proceedings. Every defendant faces the identical charge: committing a terrorist act as part of a group leading to grave consequences. Since November 2024, the court has received 159 such cases involving 267 servicemen.

Russia’s Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office publishes updates on new sentences in these cases on an almost daily basis.

In one example, the court found Yevgeny Goch, a junior lieutenant in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, guilty of committing a terrorist act. The court determined that on October 8, 2024, he entered the Kursk region, established firing positions near the village of Olgovka, and for three weeks prevented the evacuation of civilians, “intimidating them by openly carrying and using a combat weapon”. Goch was wounded and surrendered on October 27.

The incursion by Ukraine’s armed forces began in August 2024. After months of fierce fighting, Russia’s Ministry of Defence announced in late April 2025 that it had retaken control of the area from Ukrainian troops. Then, the state-run TASS news agency reported that more than 500 Ukrainian soldiers had been captured.

The Kremlin used its victory announcement to officially acknowledge for the first time that soldiers from North Korea had participated in the fighting. Russia’s chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov, stated that “fighters from the DPRK showed high professionalism” in the battle.

This admission confirmed what Mediazona has been reporting earlier based on statistical anomalies in Russia’s border data. Throughout 2024, nearly 8,000 North Korean citizens had entered Russia under the pretext of “study”, a number that did not correspond to any official educational exchange programmes and which coincided with intelligence reports of a DPRK military deployment. By early 2025, after the fighting in Kursk had subsided, the flow of these so-called students had stopped almost entirely.