Photographs of Kochas on social media show a baby-faced man. In some he is embracing an unidentified young woman. Kochas’ profile on VKontakte, Russia’s Facebook equivalent, now reads: “Killed in the Donbas.” Kochas’ grave marker at Bakinskaya gives his date of death as 21 July, shortly after his 25^th birthday and in the earliest days of Russia’s push towards Bakhmut.

Kochas’ lawyer, Stepan Akimov, described his former client as “a really ordinary guy” whom he said had been unfairly convicted. The last he heard from Kochas was a text message after his appeal failed, thanking Akimov for his help. Akimov learned from Reuters that his ex-client had joined Wagner.

“I can imagine, given the length of his sentence, and how young he was, it seemed to him a way to go free,” said Akimov. “When a prisoner has a double digit sentence, here they’re offering release in six months. Apparently, Vyacheslav thought this offer was a way out.”

Reuters was unable to reach Kochas’ surviving relatives.

Russia has one of the world’s largest prison populations per capita. Mark Galeotti, author of The Vory: Russia’s super mafia, a book on Russia’s criminal and prison cultures, says the potential appeal of Wagner to inmates is wider than just a bid for clemency. Service with Wagner, he said, offers pride and a sense of purpose to convicts with few prospects after release, people who have spent time in a prison culture suffused with “a very strong Russian nationalist tinge.”

“Yes, this will give you the chance to get out of prison, but also it gives you the chance to actually be someone,” said Galeotti. “This is a way in which actually Wagner can appeal to people who definitely are, or believe themselves to be, marginalised, outsiders, losers in some way in the system, and gives them the chance to think of themselves as becoming winners.”

At least one of the men buried at Bakinskaya concealed their criminal record and prison time from loved ones.

For over half a decade after she got married and left her hometown of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, Svitlana Holyk believed that her brother Yury Danilyuk was working somewhere in the far north of Russia. The two Ukrainian-born siblings had few living relatives and rarely spoke after Russian-backed proxies seized their home city in 2014, she said. Svitlana knew only that her brother travelled regularly 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, Yury was using social media to subscribe to pro-Russian groups supporting the Donbas separatist insurgency, his online activity shows. In 2016, having been out of touch for a year and a half, Yury told his sister that he had moved to Russia’s Arctic north. She said his messages were short, and he said little about his life.

“I suspected then that something had happened, that he might have some troubles that he did not want to or could not talk about for some reason,” she told Reuters, speaking Ukrainian, in a telephone call from Dnipro. The city is now a major logistics hub for the Ukrainian army fighting in the Donbas, and a constant target of Russian missiles.

A close friend of Yury Danilyuk spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity. The friend said that Yury lied to his sister, whom he deeply loved, to avoid upsetting her with news of his imprisonment. In reality, he had been sentenced in 2016 to nine years and eight months in prison on drugs charges. The two men were incarcerated together in Krasnodar region’s Penal Colony no. 6.

The friend said he last spoke to Yury in September 2022 and heard later that month from other inmates that Yury had joined Wagner. Olga Romanova, a prisoners-rights activist with the Russia Behind Bars watchdog group, told Reuters that Yevgeny Prigozhin has visited Penal Colony no. 6 to recruit inmates on two separate occasions. Reuters couldn’t independently verify these visits.

The friend said that during his time in jail, Yury fell in with a faction of prisoners who refuse to cooperate with prison authorities on principle – a common phenomenon in Russia’s penitentiary system. That meant Yury forfeited the chance of early release for good behaviour. He said Yury’s decision to join Wagner was motivated by the knowledge that he would likely otherwise serve his long sentence in full.

According to his grave, Yury Danilyuk died on 30 November, 2022. He was 28.

Danilyuk’s sister, Svitlana, said she had known nothing of her brother’s prison sentence, service with Wagner, and eventual death during Russia’s war against the country of their birth until contacted by Reuters journalists. Holyk said: “The fact that Yury died I learned from you. I re-read your message several times when you wrote to me. Somehow I couldn’t believe it.”

The inmate friend recalled Yury as a fierce patriot of his native Donbas, with a passion for cars. “I blame it all on him not wanting to cooperate with the prison authorities,” the friend said. “If he had agreed, he’d be alive. But he refused, so he’s a fool.”

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