Russian prison mafia4/17/2023 He was just 25 years old when he died on Nov. One of the youngest, buried at the nearby Martanskaya cemetery, is Vadim Pushnya. Wooden markers on their graves at Bakinskaya and three nearby cemeteries show the men perished between July and December 2022, at the height of the battle for Bakhmut.Įxplained | The next leg of the Russia-Ukraine war Among the convicts were citizens of Ukraine, Moldova, and the Russian-backed breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia. Other crimes included manufacturing or dealing in drugs and blackmail. Of the 39 convicts Reuters identified, 10 had been imprisoned for murder or manslaughter, 24 for robbery and two for grievous bodily harm. In 2019, Reuters reported on the existence of a Wagner training camp in the village of Molkino, around 5 miles (9 km) from Bakinskaya. The Bakinskaya plot was provided by the local authorities, he said, after the chapel ran out of space. He told local media that the men buried there had expressed a wish to be laid to rest at a Wagner chapel outside the nearby town of Goryachiy Klyuch, rather than having their bodies returned to relatives. Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti published footage in early January of Prigozhin visiting the cemetery, crossing himself and laying flowers on one grave. Image for representational purposes only. Graves of Russian Wagner mercenary group fighters are seen in a cemetery near the village of Bakinskaya in Krasnodar region, Russia, January 22, 2023. Virtually the entire plot was used by Jan. Satellite pictures show that the Wagner plot was empty in the summer, had three rows of graves by the end of November and was three-quarters full by early January. Reuters geolocated these images to the Bakinskaya cemetery and reviewed satellite imagery of the site from Maxar Technologies and Capella Space. Videos and photographs of the graves first appeared on social media channels in the Krasnodar region in December. government, Prigozhin asked Kirby to "please clarify what crime was committed" by Wagner. Toughening sanctions on Wagner this month, White House national security spokesman John Kirby branded the group "a criminal organisation that is committing widespread atrocities and human rights abuses." In a short open reply to the U.S. Western and Ukrainian officials have said it is using convicts as cannon fodder to overwhelm Ukraine's defences. Image for representational purposes only.įor months, Wagner has been locked in a bloody battle of attrition to take the towns of Bakhmut and Soledar in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region. They included a contract killer, murderers, career criminals and people with alcohol problems.Įvgeny Prigozhin (L) assists Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin during a dinner with foreign scholars and journalists at the restaurant Cheval Blanc on the premises of an equestrian complex outside Moscow November 11, 2011. Many of the men buried at Bakinskaya were convicts who were recruited by Wagner last year after its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, promised a pardon if prisoners survived six months at the front, this reporting showed. Reuters also spoke to family, friends and lawyers of some of the dead. The news agency matched the names of at least 39 of the dead here and at three other nearby cemeteries to Russian court records, publicly available databases and social media accounts. There were around 200 graves at the site on the outskirts of Bakinskaya village in Krasnodar region when Reuters visited in late January. The resting places were adorned with simple wooden crosses and brightly coloured wreaths that bore the insignia of Russia's Wagner Group - a feared and secretive private army. Late last summer, a plot of land on the edge of a small farming community in southern Russia began to fill with scores of newly dug graves of fighters killed in Ukraine.
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