Russia has the world’s largest prison population per capita. Mark Galeotti, author of The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia, a book on Russia’s criminal and prison cultures, says that Wagner’s potential appeal to prisoners is much broader than a bid for clemency. Serving with Wagner, he said, provides a sense of pride and purpose to convicts with few prospects after release, for those who have spent time in a prison culture that suffers from “a very strong Russian nationalist color”.
“Yeah, it gives you a chance to get out of jail, but it also gives you a chance to really be something,” Galeotti said. “It’s a way in which Wagner can really appeal to people who are decidedly, or consider themselves, marginalized, outsiders, losers in the system in some way, and they need to make themselves winners.” Gives you a chance to think about it.”
At least one person buried at Bakinskaya hid his criminal record and prison time from loved ones.
For more than half a decade after getting married and leaving her hometown of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, Svitlana Holik believed her brother, Yuri Daniluk, was operating somewhere in Russia’s far north. He said the two Ukraine-born siblings had few living relatives and had rarely spoken since the Russian-backed proxies took over their home town in 2014. Svitlana knew only that her brother regularly traveled for work to the Russian border city of Bryansk, 500 miles (800 km) away.
But while Svitlana was building a new life in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, Yuriy was using social media to subscribe to pro-Russian groups supporting the Donbass separatist insurgency, her online activity shows. In 2016, after being out of touch for a year and a half, Yuri told his sister that he had moved to the Arctic north of Russia. She said that his messages were short, and that he said little about his life.
“I suspected then that something happened, that he might have had some trouble that he didn’t want to or for some reason couldn’t talk about,” she told Reuters, speaking Ukrainian, in a telephone call from Dnipro. The city is now a major logistics center for the Ukrainian military fighting in Donbass, and a frequent target of Russian missiles.
A close friend of Yuri Daniluk spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity. The friend said that Yuri lied to his sister, whom he loved very much, so that she would not be upset by the news of his imprisonment. In fact, he was sentenced to nine years and eight months in prison in 2016 on drugs charges. Two people were kept together in Penal Colony No. 6 of the Krasnodar Territory.