‘My child was buried abroad’: Locals try to find and notify families of Wagner Group fighters they found buried outside Luhansk
Locals have discovered 42 fresh graves at a cemetery outside Luhansk. Judging by the names on the inscriptions, these may be the graves of Wagner Group fighters, reports BBC News Russian.
One of the women who discovered the new burial site wondered if relatives back in Russia even knew that their loved ones were buried there:
We thought, what if these people are lying here, and their families don’t even know it. So we took pictures of all the graves and started posting them in groups where people search for their missing relatives.
Nine people responded to her posts. “None of them knew that their loved ones had been killed. They were searching for them, waiting to hear from them,” she says.
BBC News matched 37 inscriptions on the graves to open-source information about the deceased, including 20 court verdicts containing the same names as the grave markers outside Luhansk.
The journalists were able to get in touch with three men’s families through the social media. In all three cases, family members said that their loved ones had been recruited by Wagner Group while serving time in prison. They left their places of incarceration in late August, and stopped returning calls in October. Neither Wagner Group nor any other branch of the Russian military has since contacted their families.
“What’s killing me is that no one told us, and it’s still nothing but silence,” said the mother of one of the deceased. “My child was buried abroad. This is terrible. I want my son to be near me. If they won’t give him back to me alive, at least let them bring the body.”
