After Wagner. Satellite imagery reveals the infamous PMC’s mark on Russian cemeteries

After Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed mutiny and subsequent death in a plane crash in the summer of 2023, his Wagner private military company fell apart. But traces of its existence can still be found—on the battlegrounds in Ukraine, where the regular army adopted the “meat-grinder” assault tactics and the practice of recruiting prison inmates as cannon fodder—and on the ground in Russia, where several cemeteries were transformed to memorialise the fighters buried there. Mediazona collected publicly available satellite imagery that shows this transformation.

Wagner PMC had been involved in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine from the very beginning. Initially deployed alongside the regular army, the group took on an increasingly independent role, with Prigozhin and commander Dmitry Utkin launching a mass recruitment drive in Russian prisons from mid-2022. Inmates were promised pardons in exchange for temporary frontline service, but then were thrown into relentless wave attacks on Ukrainian positions. Perhaps the biggest “success” of this tactic was the capture of Bakhmut, a small but strategically located town in the Donetsk region, that became the war’s deadliest battle. The vast majority of those buried in the cemetery sections documented below are these inmates, recruited from Russian prisons and killed at Bakhmut.

Irkutsk, Alexandrovskoye cemetery. 121 graves

The first reports of Wagner PMC fighters being buried at the Aleksandrovskoye cemetery on the outskirts of Irkutsk, in Eastern Siberia, came in April 2023. At the time, approximately 40 graves had been spotted. Soon after, the publication People of Baikal reported 53 graves—and relatives of some of the mercenaries buried there learnt of their deaths from journalists. The PMC even told one fighter’s sister that no such cemetery existed. To date, we know the names of 121 people recruited by Wagner who were buried here, almost all of them former inmates. The cemetery plot has a traditional design: black pyramidal headstones reminiscent of “dragon’s teeth,” the reinforced concrete anti-tank obstacles, and a white gravel apron.

Berezovsky, Sverdlovsk region. 173 graves

The first 60 graves in the cemetery at Berezovsky, a suburb of Yekaterinburg, were spotted in March 2023. Within a month, our colleagues from the BBC News Russian discovered that many relatives of the victims did not know where they were buried. Our database currently lists 173 names for this site.

Nikolayevka, Samara region. 291 graves

According to the local outlet Protokol, the first 34 graves of Wagner mercenaries in the village of Nikolayevka, near Samara, appeared in November 2022. It was thanks to this cemetery that the memorial “renovation" of the PMC’s plots became known. Almost the day after Prigozhin died in a plane crash in late August 2023, reports of what locals called “blasphemy” in Nikolayevka spread on social media and then through the press: wooden crosses from the Wagner section had been piled up and the plots bulldozed. But it soon emerged that this was preparation for the installation of the signature pyramid-shaped headstones. Our database lists 291 Wagner recruits buried near Samara.

Novosibirsk, Gusinobrodskoye cemetery. 366 graves

A separate section containing 69 Wagner graves was found by volunteers at the Gusinobrodskoye cemetery in Novosibirsk in April 2023. Our database now includes 366 mercenaries—the vast majority of them inmates—buried there.

Bakinskaya, Krasnodarsky krai. 765 graves

The most widely reported Wagner cemetery was covered by The New York Times back in February 2023. Local activist Vitaly Votanovsky—who has since left Russia—documented the growth of the Wagner section and published every name. A total of 765 mercenaries, again mostly inmates, are recorded in our database. Unlike at other sites, the pyramid-shaped headstones here stand on grass rather than white gravel.

Goryachy Klyuch, Krasnodarsky krai. 2646 places in a columbarium

Not far from the village of Bakinskaya, in the town of Goryachy Klyuch, a memorial to the Wagner PMC, complete with a chapel and columbarium, was built in 2018. At the start of the full-scale invasion, it had 21 walls, each containing 42 niches for urns. The niches bore no names, only dog-tag numbers. In the autumn of 2023, a stele was installed inscribed with the dog-tag numbers of 20,000 Wagner mercenaries killed in Ukraine, and the number of columbarium walls subsequently tripled. Their full capacity is unknown, but at that scale they could hold as many as 2,646 urns.