The images show how a cemetery of Russian mercenaries expands

A graveyard used by the infamous Russian mercenary group Wagner has grown rapidly in size in recent months, according to interviews and an analysis by New York Timess of satellite images and video sequences.

The expansion of the cemetery is a infrequent eye test which demonstrates the damage the invasion of Ukraine is doing to Wagner, especially his own private.

The expansion coincides with a bloody push by Russian soldiers and mercenaries to gain ground in eastern Ukraine.

The U.S. government claims that Wagner’s battlefield casualties numbered in the thousands, and that the 90% Some of them are convicts who have been recruited to fight in exchange for release, if they survived.

A satellite image captured on Tuesday shows about 170 graves in an area of ​​the cemetery known to house Wagner fighters, a number that has risen to nearly seven times what was seen in the satellite images of just two months.

Wagner Cemetery is a recent addition to its growing infrastructure within Russia, where it seeks to position itself as a superior fighting force to the Russian military.

Vitaly Wotanovsky, an activist and former Russian Air Force officer, first made the existence of the graves public in December, near the group’s main training facility in the southwestern town of Molkin.

Wotanovsky, 51, told the Times he visits cemeteries to document cases of Russians who have died fighting in Ukraine.

The cemetery’s location would have remained unknown had he not been informed by local residents that the area was being used to bury the unclaimed corpses of Wagner’s fighters.

Over the course of several visits, he has photographed an increasing number of gravestones and uploaded them to his channel. Telegram, Titushki in Krasnodar.

“Our goal is to show people that war causes death, and it’s not somewhere far away or on TV, but here, next to us,” Wotanovsky said.

There may even be more deaths than are easily visible.”

He noted that locals had told him that many of the fighters most likely had been cremated.

For years, Wagner’s mercenaries have kept a low profile while operating overseas, in countries such as Syria, Libya and the Central African Republic.

The United Nations and human rights groups accuse the group of attacking civilians and carrying out mass executions.

But since the start of the war in Ukraine, the group has expanded its public presence with promotional videos and affirmations of their fighting prowess, largely led by the group’s public face. Yevgeny Prigozhin.

In a video released in September, Prigozhin hinted at the cemetery’s existence as he recruited inmates from Russia’s prison system, promising to care for their remains if they were killed in combat.

“Those who don’t know where they want to be buried, we bury them near the PMC Wagner chapel,” he said.

Ten days after Wotanovsky revealed the cemetery’s location, pro-Kremlin media released several videos showing Prigozhin laying flowers on a grave in the cemetery.

There are also rows of freshly excavated graves, each adorned with crowns in the shape and color of the Wagnerian logo.

“He works a lot on heroization: now it’s kind of a Russian policy: why hang on to this life when you can die so heroically?” says Olga Romanova, founder of Russia Behind Bars, a charity that helps prisoners and women their families.

“Death is not horrible. What is horrible is the opposite: don’t die for the country”.

Those images, and Wotanovsky’s photos, also offer clues about who fought — and died — for Wagner in recent months.

At least 16 of the names and birthdates seen on the gravestones have appeared in online databases of people convicted of crimes in Russia.

Many were probably killed in the fighting around the Ukrainian cities of Bajmut and Soledarwhere the mercenaries and the Russian army have suffered heavy losses over the past four months.

In another video, Prigozhin visited the Wagner chapel, about 13 kilometers from the cemetery.

The images showed the mercenary company emulating the ways a country’s official army might commemorate their war dead, with large memorials and murals on well-manicured grounds.

You can also see rows of black walls that contain compartments typical for how cremated remains are buried.

Each compartment has an identification number and display of the deceased’s combat decorations.

The Times identified 21 total walls in the chapel, each containing 42 compartments, suggesting that hundreds of deceased Wagner fighters are buried or, at least, commemorated in the chapel.

It’s unclear whether all of these fighters died in Ukraine or elsewhere, but the images offer a rare insight extent of the losses by Wagner.

On Friday, the White House announced it would declare Wagner transnational criminal organization. Wagner is already subject to US sanctions, but this new measure would, in part, ban Americans from providing Wagner with money, goods or services.

c.2023 The New York Times Society