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Wagner Group coffins pile up in Siberia [1]

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Date: 2023-02-25  

Passengers wait to be picked up at the exit from Tolmachevo Airport in Siberia, February 11, 2013. Russian authorities want you to pay no attention to the coffins now piled up behind this airport’s runway apron.

Dozens of crude wooden coffins labeled with death certificates of Wagner Group casualties have been piling up in a building near the runways of Novosibirsk Tolmachevo Airport, the busiest airport in Siberia.

In “Dozens Of Coffins Stacked In Novosibirsk Airport Hint At Soaring Recent Russian Losses In Ukraine”, RFE/RL’s Siberia.Realities reported today that a video of the stacks of coffins recently went viral in Russia. According to RFE/RL feature writer Tony Wesolowsky:

Zooming in, the footage indicates what appears to be death certificates tacked on to each wooden box, apparently serving as coffins. Each document contains a surname and initials.

Russian authorities have denied that the coffins are located in a hangar on the airport grounds.

RFE/RL examined stills taken from the footage, deciphered the displayed death certificates, and confirmed deaths of the men involved by contacting their relatives in Siberia. The serial numbers on the coffins indicate that the dead were prison convicts who became Wagner Group mercenaries. One of the death certificates is that of Sergei Yumashev, who:

… died on January 27 in fighting around Bakhmut. Local officials in Khakassia confirmed his death on February 22, adding that he had been serving in the Wagner mercenary force at the time. “The whole village already knows that he died,” a former classmate of Yumashev told RFE/RL…. Yumashev had been serving a prison sentence for drug dealing and had run up debts worth 75,000 rubles ($986).

It appears that the villagers are unhappy about those unpaid debts.

Last week, the BBC’s Russian-language service wrote that in the previous two weeks, confirmed Russian deaths in the Ukraine war had been five times the normal rate, evidently due to recent Russian mass assaults on Bakhmut. The BBC confirms deaths by studying cemeteries, and estimated that in the past three months, about half of the confirmed dead were from regular Russian military, while the other half were mercenaries (including ex-prisoners), volunteers, and the mobilized.

The total number of Russian dead confirmed by the BBC so far is about 43,000. The actual number is surely much higher.

No wonder the coffins are piling up.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/25/2154967/-Wagner-Group-coffins-pile-up-in-Siberia

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