They emulate an anti-tank barrier, but beneath their tombstones lie almost 1,000 extinguished lives. They are nearly a thousand marble pyramids spread out on the horizon of the Bakinskaya cemetery, a stanitsa —Cossack village—in the southern Russian region of Krasnodar. It is one of the cemeteries where the Wagner Group has buried its casualties. of the invasion of Ukraine. One more from the region: wreaths of dead soldiers dot the outskirts of villages and burials never stop. Everywhere there are recruitment advertisements and offers from funeral companies. Young and old have gone to the front, the authorities pay well to those who survive.
Krasnodar was the main base of the mercenary company until the unit was forced to join the Russian Armed Forces a year ago because of the hostility of its owner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, towards the high command. That confrontation culminated in a failed rebellion and the death in a plane crash, in circumstances still unclear, of the man known as Putin’s ChefHis ghost, however, still hovers over the Kremlin.
At the cemetery, Prigozhin’s memory is still present. His figure was evoked again by nationalist circles after the dismissal of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu last May and the arrests within his circle. Despite his integration into the army, the Kremlin has not dared to close the company’s main Telegram channels, such as the Wagner Orchestra, with more than half a million subscribers. In the midst of the stalemate at the front, his followers remember Prigozhin’s victories and his temperament in the face of the silence of other commanders. “He was desperate, he was irascible and he provoked terror, especially among our own. He was history and now he is legend,” recalls a member of that channel.
Unlike Bakinskaya, the cemetery in Goriachi Klyuch is off-limits to the public. It is a sacred place for Wagner. The mercenaries built their church there and last April, in defiance of the Kremlin, erected statues of Prigozhin and his right-hand man, Major Dmitri Utkin, who also died in the destruction of the plane just two months after President Vladimir Putin said he had “forgiven” those who took part in the mutiny.
These are small gestures, but very symbolic in the face of the tension that is throbbing in Russia. Flags with the famous skull of the mercenary group have been removed from Wagner cemeteries and criticism of the Ministry of Defense is subtle now. The channels of Prigozhin’s company have declined to make comments to this newspaper, although previously, in tributes to its founder, some members of Wagner acknowledged to El PAÍS that the rebellion was a mistake and his death, “things of politics.”
Continuous trickle of deaths
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Part of the Bakinskaya cemetery contains the remains of Wagner’s rank-and-file soldiers “who died for their country between 2022 and 2023,” most of them in the leaden months of the bloody offensive on Bakhmut. But the trickle of dead continues: in one corner there are several slabs with the year 2024 written on them.
In another part of the cemetery, the civilian area, there are dozens more graves. Officers from both Wagner and the army are buried there. On some tombstones the symbol of the special forces of the GRU, the special forces of the Russian military intelligence service. “Our symbol is a bat. After all, we in intelligence are still with you, little brother,” reads one of the plaques illustrated with the deceased carrying a heavy machine gun. Another says that “to be a soldier is to be immortal.”
Opposite, two gravediggers are propping up the grave of another officer who lost his life in January 2023 at the age of 58. His age is not exceptional: many Russian volunteers buried there were born between the 1960s and 1980s. “But there are also young people and parents,” emphasises one of the gravediggers as he prepares the slabs of that grave with fresh cement. As he explains to this newspaper on condition of anonymity, fighters from all over Russia are buried in Bakinskaya.
Moscow does not publish its casualty figures. According to the British Ministry of Defence, the number of Russian dead and wounded by April was 450,000, while the British broadcaster BBC and the Russian newspapers Mediazona and Meduza The death toll is estimated at more than 120,000. These media have been collecting data on the deceased from open sources, such as inheritances, since the beginning of the conflict. According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Russian army had 180,000 dead by February, compared to about 31,000 Ukrainians.
“We lose our lives in an instant, but the pain lasts forever,” reads one officer’s epitaph. More than 19,500 Wagner members died in the Bakhmut carnage between autumn 2022 and the first half of 2023, according to the Mid-zone and BBC. Its journalists had access to a list of the company’s posthumous payments and found that some 17,000 of the deceased were prisoners – some of whom had committed bloody crimes – pardoned by Putin.
The bloodletting has not stopped in 2024. A few kilometres from Bakinskaya, a funeral procession of dozens of people can be seen from the road behind the portrait of another soldier in a nearby village.
Mass burials of soldiers have sparked protests in the Krasnodar region. The mayor of neighbouring Goriachi Kliuch —hot keyBakinskaya, in Russian, asked last year to be buried elsewhere, but was silenced by threats from some deputies in Moscow to send him to the front. According to Bakinskaya’s funeral worker, the authorities will continue to bury soldiers in her cemetery. “Everyone says they will close it, but I think they will continue. There is no more room anywhere,” he says, before sighing in front of the hundreds of graves: “What a pity.”
The Russian Ministry of Defence has resumed the operations of the Wagner Group in Krasnodar after purging its ranks. Its main base in the area is located in the town of Molkino, very close to its Bakinskaya and Goriachi Klyuch cemeteries.
Enlistment offers and funerals
Beyond Wagner, Krasnodar is a fishing ground for the Russian army. In that province, death has become an industrial process. The propaganda of the recruitment centres is mixed with the discounts of the funeral homes. The army posters promise “a job for real men”, and on their signs there are images of soldiers equipped with assault weapons and balaclavas with astronomical salaries for the average Russian: just over 200,000 rubles a month (about 2,000 euros) plus an initial payment of one million rubles shared by the local administration and the government.
These are salaries that are out of reach for the average Russian. The small print on the posters also reminds that relatives can receive other benefits if their loved one dies at the front. Among others, a payment of five million rubles, or about 50,000 euros. In July, Putin doubled the first payment that volunteers receive, from 195,000 to 400,000 rubles (almost 4,000 euros). And the regions are in a race to see who can offer the highest salaries.
“Everyone has gone to the front, they pay well there,” says Sasun, a restaurant owner in Krasnodar who converted to taxi driving a year ago because he had run out of customers. “I didn’t earn anything for six months, many young people left. I’m closing down the business now,” laments the Armenian immigrant, who is over 50 years old. “Business has changed completely,” he sighs.
As well as being a recruiting point, Krasnodar is a key crossing point for the army. The movement of troops marching to Donbas or returning home from the front is constant. At the central bus station, a dozen soldiers wait with their loved ones before boarding the bus to Novorossiysk-Luhansk. It is night and they barely speak, it could be their last time together.
Among the soldiers there is a very young boy accompanied by his mother. Dressed in a T-shirt with the Z, The Russian symbol of the invasion of Ukraine, he looks more like a teenager on his first day of university than someone who is going to try to survive the next few months among drones and artillery.
Another fighter, aged around 50, waits with a serious expression next to his wife. They embrace each other before boarding the bus, and they wave goodbye again once they are inside the vehicle. When it leaves, she bursts into tears.
The front leaves its mark. At the night stop At a petrol station in Kropotkin, a soldier from another bus joins another passenger at a table with a cup of coffee. With a sunken face and a long, abandoned beard, the soldier chains his movements with a terrible slowness, but what is most striking is his gaze, the thousand yard starethe lifeless expression in his eyes. “Everything is complicated,” says the soldier wearing the “Demon” insignia on his shoulder in a brief conversation.
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