"It's a shame that it became clear that you shouldn't vote for Putin only when they started shooting at us"

A Russian man refused to leave his home in the border region until an explosion hit the house, then he and his wife jumped into a neighbor's car to escape.

Another Russian did not want to evacuate and crawled into the woods, spending two days dodging landmines and drones before heading to the city of Kursk. A woman cried as she waited at a humanitarian aid point in Kursk itself.

"Honestly, I am very surprised by what is happening. It seems that we are not abandoning our own and all that, but here are several thousand (Russian) soldiers now in captivity and now the Russian territory is occupied," said the 35-year-old mechanic Misha, who stood in front of the humanitarian aid distribution center. "This is not what I expected when the war started".

Eight days after the start of the stunning invasion - the largest incursion into Russian territory since World War II - Ukrainian forces continue to expand their operations in the southwestern Kursk region, which has more than 150 kilometers of border with Ukraine.

As of August 14, nearly 1.000 square kilometers are believed to be under the control of Ukrainian troops, as Russian military and security forces struggle to contain the advance.

Civilian authorities are still struggling to cope with the flood of people who have been evacuated or are fleeing their homes. According to reports, 120.000 people have fled the Ukrainian advance; many ended up in Kursk, a regional administrative center that was home to about 440.000 people before the war.

And more and more say they are frustrated with the way officials - right down to President Vladimir Putin - have responded to the crisis.

"We left under fire"

At a humanitarian aid distribution center in Kursk on August 9, groups of people - many of them evacuees - milled around, with riot police trying to maintain order as some tried to grab supplies being unloaded and distributed by volunteers .

"We left under fire, at the last moment," said the woman, who introduced herself only as Nataša and said she was from the village of Korenevo. "The husband did not want to leave, he kept saying: 'This is my home, I am a man, I will protect it'. We heard the tanks and went outside to look at them. A second later, there was nothing to protect: either the missile or the drones hit the house".

Nataša said that she and her husband jumped into a neighbor's car and sped away from Korenevo, about 28 kilometers from the border.

"The whole sky was already buzzing, we were flying at some crazy speed. I closed my eyes, grabbed the (door) handle and that's how we arrived," she told Radio Free Europe (RSE).

She nodded towards the neighbor who fled in the same car and who was standing next to her crying.

"Everyone is on edge," Nataša said, adding that the other woman missed part of the humanitarian aid and that she was also disturbed by television reports that downplayed the seriousness of the situation.

"I have two children, I got three pillows, and it wasn't enough for her," she said. "Then in the evening she saw on television that it turned out that everything is fine here, we are in 'good spirits', 'we are holding on' and 'we feel the support of the whole country and the president'".

"The country's support is more than enough, we don't need the president's support," Nataša said about Putin. Asked to explain, she said: "What is he to us? It's a shame that it became clear that 'you shouldn't vote for him' only when they started shooting at us".

Standing not far away, Miša, a mechanic from Bolšoja Soldatski, a village 30 kilometers from the border, described how he had asked for evacuation help a few days earlier, but gave up when he didn't get an answer and went into a nearby forest to hide.

"I understood that there will be no evacuation. Maybe the evacuation trucks have already been destroyed," said Misha, who did not want his last name to be published. In the woods, he saw drones overhead and worried he would be a target.

"There were mines in the forest. Dark green and brown petals. I had to walk very slowly. If you step on one, you lose your leg, then you have to crawl," he said. "On the first day I hoped to find something to eat, but there was nothing. On the second day I thought I was eating frogs; it had just rained, there were many of them".

After two days, he said, he heard cars honking on the road, so he signaled that he needed a ride to Kursk.

He said he was frustrated that shortly after launching the invasion in February 2022, Russian authorities claimed that the operation would be completed quickly and that Russian forces would "liberate" Ukraine's Donbass region, as per Kremlin propaganda falsely claiming that Donbass illegally occupied by the Ukrainian government.

"I thought that we would quickly liberate Donbas, include it in Russia and that would be it. And then it turned out that there was more," added Misha.

"Some people talk about Kherson, some people talk about Odesa," he said, referring to other regions of Ukraine targeted by Russian forces. "But the 'rescue' has now reached the stage where we need to save the Kursk region. My house needs to be freed now," Misha said.

"Why is everything happening so inconveniently?"

Olga, a 50-year-old who lives in St. Petersburg, said her mother Lyudmila does not want her to leave her home in Kursk, even though the city's services are slowly winding down.

"My mother says that almost all buses and trolleybuses have stopped running today, and trams - only taxis remain. There is a shortage of water again," Olga told RSE by phone from St. Petersburg.

"My mother doesn't think anything terrible is happening," she said, adding that her mother thinks the situation closer to the border — like in the town of Suja, which Ukrainian commanders claim is occupied — is not as bad as it is portrayed.

"She thinks that she is exaggerating everything in relation to Suja," said Olga. "She says: 'This is being deliberately spread on the Internet to scare us.'"

Nataša, a woman from Korenevo, said that for many of those who were evacuated, there is palpable frustration with how the humanitarian situation developed, and especially with how the whole war went.

"I understand everything... Why is everything happening so inconveniently," she complained.

She pointed to a series of high-profile corruption investigations in recent months targeting top Defense Department officials, as well as earlier reports that Russian soldiers had looted Ukrainian homes with toilets in the early months of the invasion.

"The generals are being imprisoned. There is no end in sight to the war. It turns out that there are only thieves there, in our army," she said. "Maybe stealing the toilet wasn't a lie either?"