Wagner cemetery destroyed after leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death

The Russian village of Nikolayevka was once the sight of hundreds of graves, but now they’ve had their crosses removed and thrown into massive piles.

The cemetery had appeared earlier this year in the southwestern region of Samara Oblast, where Prigozhin unveiled a black obelisk as a way to remember the exploits of the Wagner fighters.

However, a video that has appeared on X, formerly known as Twitter, shows the graves being destroyed with crosses and wreaths “piled up like rubbish”.

While Prigozhin’s obelisk was left untouched, the rest of the cemetery wasn’t so lucky.

“Where this path is, were graves. Everything has been demolished,” an unknown man said in the clip.

“What are you doing guys? This is blasphemy. People were dying for Russia and you levelled all their graves.

“What are you doing, are you not afraid of God?”

In the video, he shows how the crosses and wreaths have been torn down and tossed into large piles, with gravel laid out where the cemetery used to be.

The man points out the year on the crosses – 2023.

“Crosses for all the dead guys, notice the year – 2023. All Wagner wreaths dumped in a pile,” he continued.

“And here, where the work is going on, were graves of Wagnerites. Nikolaev cemetery, unclear what’s going on, all crosses and wreaths were collected.

“No idea what they’re doing here.”

There has been no official comment from the Samara Oblast authorities.

In June this year, Prigozhin had ordered his convicted mercenaries to march on Moscow in mutiny against Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The mutiny ultimately failed and there’s been speculation that Putin had “lured Prigozhin to Russia for a mafia-style hit involving a bomb that was bolted to his jet’s landing gear,” an intelligence expert claimed.

Putin has denied these allegations.