A rapidly expanding cemetery in a southern Russian village offers insight into the convicts who are fighting - and dying - for the secretive mercenary army of Wagner Group.

Late last summer, a plot of land on the edge of a small farming community in southern Russia began to fill with scores of newly dug graves of fighters killed in Ukraine. The resting places were adorned with simple wooden crosses and brightly coloured wreaths that bore the insignia of Russia’s Wagner Group - a feared and secretive private army.

There were around 200 graves at the site on the outskirts of Bakinskaya village in Krasnodar region when Reuters visited in late January. The news agency matched the names of at least 39 of the dead here and at three other nearby cemeteries to Russian court records, publicly available databases and social media accounts. Reuters also spoke to family, friends and lawyers of some of the dead.

Many of the men buried at Bakinskaya were convicts who were recruited by Wagner last year after its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, promised a pardon if prisoners survived six months at the front, this reporting showed. They included a contract killer, murderers, career criminals and people with alcohol problems.

For months, Wagner has been locked in a bloody battle of attrition to take the towns of Bakhmut and Soledar in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. Western and Ukrainian officials have said it is using convicts as cannon fodder to overwhelm Ukraine’s defences. Toughening sanctions on Wagner this month, White House national security spokesman John Kirby branded the group “a criminal organisation that is committing widespread atrocities and human rights abuses.” In a short open reply to the U.S. government, Prigozhin asked Kirby to “please clarify what crime was committed” by Wagner.

Videos and photographs of the graves first appeared on social media channels in the Krasnodar region in December. Reuters geolocated these images to the Bakinskaya cemetery and reviewed satellite imagery of the site from Maxar Technologies and Capella Space. Satellite pictures show that the Wagner plot was empty in the summer, had three rows of graves by the end of November and was three-quarters full by early January. Virtually the entire plot was used by Jan. 24 . Local activist Vitaly Votanovsky, who took the first pictures and has documented soldiers killed in Ukraine and buried in Krasnodar region graveyards, told Reuters he observed a truck delivering bodies to the cemetery. He said gravediggers told him the bodies had come from the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, close to Russia’s border with Donetsk region. When Reuters visited the cemetery in January, fences and security cameras were being installed around the plot and another burial was underway.