Evgeniy Prokopenko19:08, 21.09.23

Not all relatives of the dead occupiers found their burial places; they are buried without the knowledge of their relatives.

In four months, the cemetery of the Wagner PMC mercenaries near Irkutsk doubled from 66 to 140 graves and ceased to be secret. According to the Russian publication ” People of Baikal “, expanding its area cost the city 14 million rubles. 

According to the publication, in the spring, only a few relatives of the prisoners who were recruited for the war knew about the graves of the Wagner PMC mercenaries at the Alexander Cemetery. When the PMC began to suffer heavy losses near Bakhmut, the company did not always inform the relatives where the deceased was buried.

Journalists report that relatives of prisoners searched for them through telegram chats – this is how Olga, the publication writes, managed to find her brother. It turned out that the prisoner who went to war in Ukraine was buried in March 11 kilometers from Irkutsk. The PMC, according to Olga, did not deny the fact of the burial, but insisted that “the relatives could not get through.” Arriving at the cemetery, Olga saw several dozen fresh graves with red and black wreaths.

“They were lying in rows, and graves were still being dug in front of us,” the woman told reporters in April of this year.

The media learned that some families learned that their loved ones were buried near Irkutsk from journalists. Through social networks, the magazine’s authors managed to contact the sister of Alexander Durnev, who was buried there, Ksenia. She lives in the village of Ulyatuy, Trans-Baikal Territory. Hearing that her brother was buried near Irkutsk, she called the Wagner PMC, where Durnev’s death was confirmed.

“In April 2023, we managed to find 53 graves of mercenaries of the Wagner PMC – initially the Wagner square was located in the far corner of the cemetery, far from the Alley of Heroes. According to local residents, the forest for the graves began to be cut down in late September – early October 2022 year,” the investigation says.

This also coincides with the data on the government procurement portal – at the beginning of September 2022, the administration of Irkutsk published on the portal a contract for clearing a burial site. By April 2023, the city had spent almost 13 million on the improvement of the Alexander Cemetery – more than two million on the “improvement of new burial plots”, and nine on the improvement of the burial of “honorable citizens” – we are talking about the burial of mercenaries of the Wagner PMC.

At first, the PMC tried to hush up the appearance of more and more burials of mercenaries – the sister of one of the victims was told by the PMC that the Alexander Cemetery did not exist. Yevgeny Prigozhin, in response to a request from the BBC Russian Service, why the families did not receive news of the mercenary’s funeral and learned about his death from journalists or volunteers, insisted that “all fighters of the Wagner PMC who die in the Northern Military District are hiding in strict regulations with the company’s rules “.

“If I wanted to hide a mass grave away from prying eyes, I would hide it in the Alexander Cemetery,” the former director of one of the Irkutsk cemeteries reasoned in a conversation with journalists.

But mercenaries continued to die in the war, cemeteries grew, and the scale of burial became more difficult to hide. Gradually, the attitude of both residents and authorities towards the Wagner PMC began to change.

(C)UNIAN 2023