New mass burial of Wagnerites found near Luhansk

A new burial of people who might have died while serving as mercenaries in the Russian Wagner Group has been found near the occupied city of Luhansk.

Source: BBC News Russian

Details: In early February, 42 fresh graves of men were found in a local cemetery near the village of Kirovka in Luhansk. Locals claim that no one visits the graves and that none of those buried are known to them.

The news agency managed to find information in open sources regarding 37 men whose data matched the inscriptions on gravestones near Luhansk.

Quote: "35 of them were Russian, one was a citizen of Belarus, and one was born in Uzbekistan. The websites of Russian courts published verdicts against 20 people who are full namesakes of those buried in Luhansk. All of them were supposed to be serving their sentences in prison."

"The online pages of the full namesakes of most of the men buried near Luhansk can be found on social media. Judging by [their] posts, only one of them was an orphan, and several others spent most of their lives in prison and may not have had any close people outside the prisons. Most of them were in constant contact with family and friends."

Details: The agency points out that the burial near Luhansk is the third cemetery where dozens of graves of convicts who fought in Ukraine as part of the Wagner private military company (PMC) have been discovered.

47 graves of convicts were discovered in the village of Bakinskaya, Krasnodar Krai [Russia], in December. In just two months, the number of graves increased sixfold, as by the end of January, there were 270 graves of dead convicts. Each of them contains a wreath with the red, black and yellow emblem that is found on the patches and flags of the Wagner PMC.

In early February, residents of the village of Fryanovo near Moscow discovered a new cemetery alley of 22 graves in a neighbouring village. Each one had the same red, black, and yellow wreaths as the one in the village of Bakinskaya.

Later, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of Wagner PMC, confirmed that the cemetery in the village of Bakinskaya belongs to his private military company, but he has not yet commented on the status of the graves in Moscow Oblast and near Luhansk.

Background:

• In January, The New York Times analysed satellite images and video footage and concluded that the cemetery used by the Wagner PMC to bury killed mercenaries in the village of Bakinskaya, Krasnodar Krai, had grown seven times over the past few months.
• On 9 February, Prigozhin stated that the recruitment of convicts to the recognised criminal private military company had completely stopped. He never specified what caused such a decision.

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