How an activist documented Russia's war dead by counting graves - and was forced to flee by sinister threats.
He painstakingly recorded the names and details of all the graves he found.
Vitaly identified the graves of the men who had died in the war - as opposed to regular, civilian deaths - by asking local people, as well as studying the wreaths and photos on the graves.But while there, cemetery workers told Vitaly and his colleague that they were burying Wagner mercenaries killed in battle.
Vitaly kept returning to document the numbers and names of the dead. I ask Vitaly if he knew who the men were. "It was obvious they were convicts and mercenaries," he tells me. "The fact is, since December 2022, Russia's battlefield losses multiplied by several times," says Vitaly, citing the statistics he's collected in Krasnodar.
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