Near the occupied Luhansk found the burial of mercenaries “PVK Wagner”.
Residents of the village of Kirovka discovered 42 graves of men that no one visits, and none of the buried are familiar to them.
Journalists from the BBC Russian Service were able to find court sentences for 20 people who are full namesakes of those buried in this village. All of them had to serve their sentences in places of deprivation of liberty.
The journalists also managed to contact the relatives of the three buried, who confirmed that the dead had entered into a contract with the “Wagnerites”.
Relatives of at least 9 victims were not aware of their deaths. Three people told the BBC they thought they were missing and have been trying to find out the fate of their loved ones for months.
We thought that these people are lying here, and their relatives do not even know about it. Here they photographed all the graves, began to distribute groups of searches for the missing. And nine people responded to me. All of them did not even know that their loved ones had died. They were looking for them, waiting for news,” said one of the women who discovered the burial.
The BBC was able to find references to 37 men in open sources, whose data match the inscriptions on grave tablets near Lugansk. 35 of them were Russians, one citizen of Belarus, another was born in Uzbekistan.
So, according to court documents, Miroslav Zinchuk received his first term at 16 years old – for theft and causing grievous bodily harm. He quit two years later and almost immediately ended up in a colony for theft and robbery. In 2017, he received a new sentence – for theft.
Timur Tibaev from Ulyanovsk was also repeatedly convicted for robbery, he received the last term in 2022. Maksadbek Khadzhiev from Uzbekistan worked as a house painter and was convicted in 2021 of an attempted sale of heroin.
Officially, the Kremlin does not comment on the participation of prisoners in the hostilities in Ukraine. But at least one prisoner who fought in the Wagner PIK was personally awarded by the President of Russia.
Pages of full abstracts of most of the men buried near Lugansk can be found on social networks. Judging by the publications, only one of them was an orphan, and several more people spent most of their lives in prison and, possibly, had no relatives outside the colonies. Most were in constant contact with family and friends.
My son and I were constantly in touch. And in the colony, and now afterwards. He called me in early September from Lugansk. He said that from the first of September he signed a contract with Wagner’s NDK, asked for my data so that his salary would come to me, – the mother of one of the prisoners told the BBC.
The burial near Lugansk is already the third cemetery where dozens of graves of prisoners who fought in Ukraine as part of the Wagner PKK are found.
In December 2022, 47 graves of convicts were discovered in the village of the Baku Krasnodar Territory. In just two months, the number of burials increased sixfold – by the end of January, there were already 270 graves of the dead prisoners. Each one has a wreath with a red-black-yellow emblem found on the stripes and flags of the Wagner PPK.
In early February, residents of the Fryanovo village near Moscow discovered a new cemetery alley of 22 graves in a neighboring village. On each lay the same red-black-yellow wreaths as at the village of Baku. On the net, you can find sentences of 12 people whose initials completely match the data on the tablets.
The BBC was able to contact the family of one of the victims – they confirmed that he had been arrested. He did not report his desire to leave for the war; he stopped communicating in October. The relatives did not know about the death of the prisoner.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner PPK, confirmed that the cemetery in the village of the Baku Krasnodar Territory belongs to his private military company, but has not yet commented on the status of burials in the Moscow region and near Lugansk.
It is impossible to establish the exact number of Russian prisoners who died in Ukraine. Both human rights activists and BBC sources at the front say that the detachments, made up of prisoners, are actively used on the front line, and they suffer heavy losses.
Source: Racurs
I am David Wyatt, a professional writer and journalist for Buna Times. I specialize in the world section of news coverage, where I bring to light stories and issues that affect us globally. As a graduate of Journalism, I have always had the passion to spread knowledge through writing.