News Desk
ISLAMABAD/KRASNODAR: An expanding cemetery has popped up on a plot of land in a small farming village in southern Russia with scores of newly dug graves of Wagner Group mercenaries who have been killed in Ukraine since the war began.
The graves, adorned with wooden crosses and brightly-coloured floral wreaths, bore the insignia of Russia’s secretive private army, Wagner Group.
200 graves in the cemetery
There were roughly 200 graves in the cemetery on the outskirts of Bakinskaya village in the Krasnodar region in late January. Reuters matched the names of at least 39 of the dead at the graveyard and at three other nearby cemeteries to Russian court records, public databases and social media accounts. Families, friends and lawyers of some of those killed to confrim the deaths.
Many of the dead buried at Bakinskaya were convicts who were recruited by Wagner last year after its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, promised a pardon if the convicted prisoners survived six months at the battlefield. The dead included a killer of a contractor, several murderers, criminals and people with alcohol issues.
For months, Wagner had been engaged in a bloody battle to take the towns of Bakhmut and Soledar in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. Western and Ukrainian officials eralier said it was using convicts as cannon fodder to counter Ukraine’s defences.
White House terms Wagner ‘criminal organization’
Toughening sanctions on Wagner earlier this month, White House national security spokesman John Kirby branded the armed group “a criminal organization that was committing widespread atrocities and human rights violations.”
In a propt reply to the US, Prigozhin told Kirby to clarify what crime had been committed by Wagner.
Videos and photographs of the graves first appeared on social media in december in the Krasnodar region.
Satellite pictures showed that the Wagner plot was empty in the summer, but had three rows of graves by the end of November and was almost three-quarters full by early January. Virtually almost the entire plot was used by January 24.
Truck delivering bodies to the graveyard
Local activist Vitaly Votanovsky, who was the first to take pictures and documented soldiers killed in Ukraine and buried in Krasnodar graveyards, told Reuters that he observed a truck delivering bodies to the graveyard.
He said gravediggers said the bodies had come from the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, close to Russia’s border with the Donetsk region. Fences and security cameras were being installed and another burial was being dug when Reuters visited the cemetery in January.
RIA Novosti, a Russian state-owned news agency published footage in early January of Prigozhin visiting the cemetery, crossing himself and laying flowers on a grave of a dead soldier. He told local media that the men buried in the cemetery had expressed the desire to be buried at a Wagner chapel outside the nearby town of Goryachiy Klyuch, rather than sending their bodies to their homes. The Bakinskaya plot was provided by the local authorities after the chapel ran out of space.
Of the 39 convicts and now dead, 10 had been convicted for murder or manslaughter, 24 for robbery and two for grievous bodily harm. Other crimes included dealing in drugs and blackmail.
Among the convicted dead were citizens of Ukraine, Moldova, and the Russian-backed breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia. Wooden markers on their graves at Bakinskaya and three other cemeteries showed the men perished between July and December 2022, at the height of the battle for Bakhmut.
