ASTRA spoke with the mother of one of the dead, and also found the first videos of Russian servicemen filmed by them during the movement of the convoy a few hours before the attack.

For the first time, information that a military column of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation was defeated on the night of August 8-9 near the village of Oktyabrskoye in the Rylsky district of the Kursk region appeared both in Russian military publications and in Ukrainian late at night on August 9.

Then a morning video with the consequences of the attack appeared — burned equipment and dead Russian servicemen were visible on the footage.

For this shooting, a 48-year-old resident of the Kursk village was subsequently detained, the Kremlin media reported. ASTRA found out that there were servicemen of at least two military units in the damaged column – military unit 13140 (810 Marine Brigade, Sevastopol) and military unit 72164 (Leningrad region). The attack took place around midnight on August 9th. The moment of the HIMARS missiles strike on the Russian convoy later appeared online.

According to one of the relatives of the missing serviceman from the 72164 military unit, the last time the man called her was around 23:40 on August 8. After that, he stopped contacting and has not been contacted until now. His fate is currently unknown. This is also confirmed by the messages of other relatives of military personnel in / h 72164 in thematic chats.

“My husband called at 23:36, after that he did not get in touch. Then there was the attack. They were attacked at exactly midnight,” says the wife of one of the servicemen who disappeared after the attack.

The exact number of dead, injured and missing is unknown — relatives exchange various data among themselves, which includes data on 96, and in some cases 300 dead. However, there is no confirmation of this information. Relatives of those servicemen who stopped contacting after the attack on the convoy are not provided with any information either in military units, or in the Ministry of Defense, or in hospitals. There were probably conscripts in the column as well, but ASTRA was not able to confirm this at the time of publication of the material. 

However, ASTRA was able to confirm the identities of the two dead in the convoy — these are military personnel of military unit 13140, cousins from the Astrakhan region — Nikolai Linkov and Ruslan Gelyazhev. Nikolai’s mother told ASTRA that it became possible to find out about the death of the brothers due to the fact that another of their relatives survived the shelling of the column, he also informed Nikolai and Ruslan’s parents about their deaths. The bodies of the men were taken to the Rostov morgue.

“My son is a contractor. We don’t know when is the funeral. They have just been brought to Rostov, and now they have called us. We probably have to go there tomorrow. There were a lot of them, all the hospitals, all the morgues were full. They died on August 9, the date of death is the same as we were told,” the mother of the contractor Nikolai Linkov (v/h 13140) from the village of Bolkhuny in the Astrakhan region, who died in the column destroyed near Rylsky, told ASTRA.

Some of the military personnel of military unit 72164 who were in the column, according to relatives, were in Kursk at the time of the penetration of the Armed Forces of Ukraine into the Kursk region on August 6, but on the 7th they were sent on a mission to Ukraine. However, in the process of movement, the servicemen were deployed back in the direction of Kursk, so on the 8th the column was already moving in the opposite direction, according to relatives. Another relative claims that her husband was planned to be sent in the direction of Volchansk, Kharkiv region, but “reinforcements were needed in the Kursk region.”

The military personnel of military unit 72164, who survived the attack on the convoy, are contacting their relatives from hospitals in Moscow and from the forests of the Kursk region, relatives report. Those who were not injured were sent to positions near Kursk, they do not know their new location. It is also claimed that some of the surviving soldiers escaped, their whereabouts are unknown.

ASTRA publishes the first videos of Russian servicemen, filmed by them during the movement of the column a few hours before the attack, which were at the disposal of the editorial office.

“The direction is to Kursk. Release the Kraken, fuck you, fuck you!” one of the soldiers says in a video from the convoy on the afternoon of August 8, a few hours before the attack.

In the second video, military personnel take pictures of themselves as they move in the Kursk region.