The person who published the photo of the “Wagner PMC” cemetery announced threats to his address

Vitaly Votanovsky, a resident of Kuban, who photographed the Wagner PMC cemetery and posted the images on his Telegram channel, told about the threats he received from unknown people.

According to Votanovsky, he is being called by men posing as employees of the funeral service and offering to buy a place at the cemetery “at a discount”. One of them warned that death might come suddenly.

Earlier, Votanovsky reported on his social networks that a cemetery with the graves of PMC Wagner fighters killed in Ukraine, many of whom were recruited prisoners, appeared in the village of Bakinskaya in the Krasnodar region. In a few months, about 270 new graves appeared at the cemetery, while one hundred burials were made since January 25. After that, an article was published in the local publication “Zhivaya Kuban” in which Votanovsky was called a “foreign agent” and a “supporter of Zelensky”. The author of the article claimed that he knew the activist’s home address and called for him to be held accountable.

• Vitaly Votanovsky is a military pensioner, a retired lieutenant colonel, and also a former volunteer of the Krasnodar headquarters of Alexei Navalny. He was repeatedly detained and fined for participating in protest actions, including rallies and pickets against the war in Ukraine. In addition, the activist was searched several times.
• In the spring of last year, after several military defeats by the Russian army on the territory of Ukraine, “PMC Wagner” and personally its creator and sponsor, St. Petersburg businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is close to Vladimir Putin, began to recruit Russian prisoners into their ranks and send them to war. Convicts who agree to take part in hostilities must spend six months on the front lines, they are forbidden to retreat and surrender under the threat of execution. Those who will remain alive after six months are promised pardon. In this way, the PMC recruited tens of thousands of people into its ranks, who were thrown into the front line. Military correspondents have repeatedly reported on the huge losses incurred by units consisting of prisoners, as well as on extrajudicial executions practiced in them.