“One giant mass grave” – Russian soldiers speak of a second Stalingrad at Tyotkino

Wounded soldiers have waited for weeks for someone to bring them out, supplies are faltering, and no one has gone back for some of the dead since last spring – this is how Russian soldiers describe what is happening around Tyotkino in Kursk region. The accounts were published by Severny Kanal, a pro-war Russian Telegram channel, and the English translation was posted on November 5 by British open-source researcher ChrisO_wiki.

The settlement, which previously had about 3,800 residents and lies on the border between Russia's Kursk region and Ukraine's Sumy region, is surrounded on three sides by Ukrainian-held territory. According to one soldier, Ukrainian forces also control the road junctions, while bodies have been lying near the railway and in the Rzhovsky Forest since as far back as 2025. Another account came with a video in which the soldier pans down a street where the houses used to be intact but now only the walls of three or four buildings are still standing, more or less. According to the soldiers, the 9th and 22nd regiments have effectively been ground down, a separate assault unit also suffered heavy losses, and some of the wounded died after waiting in vain for weeks to be evacuated. Summarizing the Russian accounts, ChrisO_wiki wrote of soldiers who are starving and complaining about the lack of supplies and about their command, while the Bulgarian outlet Actualno, citing the same Russian sources, reported around two thousand deaths since August. The local casualty figures and the state of the units have not been confirmed by independent sources, and there is still no reliable data on how many soldiers remain in the area.

Separately from the Tyotkino accounts, it is worth looking at the Ukrainian General Staff's nationwide tally, which puts Russian personnel losses in October at 54,400, up 8,170 from September, making it the highest monthly figure reported since the start of the full-scale invasion. This includes the wounded, and the cumulative figure since February 2022, reported on November 1 at 1,590,270, is likewise a Kyiv estimate. According to Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, commander of Ukraine's unmanned systems forces, his units hit a Russian soldier on average every 159 seconds in October.

According to Volodymyr Zelensky, in October the Russian army seized 85.8 square kilometers, while Ukrainian forces recaptured 96.2 square kilometers. The American Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reported different territorial figures, but based on changes verifiable from open sources, it likewise concluded that Russia lost more territory than it gained. As for replacing losses, CSIS wrote back in the summer that, by its estimate, in the first half of 2026 the Russian army lost more men each month than it managed to recruit. In early October, Moscow announced the autumn conscription of about 120,000 men for mandatory military service, claiming they would not be sent to the front in Ukraine.

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