I imagine it would be disconcerting to visit the grave of your brother and find instead an entire cemetery gone, the gravestones gone, and the land bulldozed. Local officials denied that the cemetery was destroyed, however. They claim it had already fallen into disrepair and that a new beautification project was started to clean the area up and make it worthy of their sacrifice, or some such rationale for levelling the site.
Whatever the truth, the sister’s video went viral on social media this week, forcing the Russians to address the situation.
Source: Sakha Press (Russia)
Recently, a message appeared on social networks* that the graves of Yakuts killed in the North Military District were allegedly destroyed at the Magan Cemetery in Yakutsk. “We came to visit my brother’s grave and did not find it, everything there was razed to the ground,” said the message from a Yakut woman whose relative is buried there.
To confirm these words, the woman posted a video in which a grader was leveling the ground, according to her, at the burial site.
However, it turned out that this information is not true. This is reported by the relatives of the SVO participants buried in the cemetery:
“We, relatives whose relatives are buried at the Maganskoye Cemetery, have been trying for two years to create a Memorial Complex. For this, we hired a surveyor so that our fallen husbands, sons, fathers, and sons would lie as Heroes should.You did not see the horror that was happening there, there was a garbage dump. The heroes were lying under temporary monuments and collapsed grave mounds. From all the families who were there, everyone was for the improvement, everyone gave their consent to the work (in writing). Without the work that is in the video, it is impossible to do without when creating the Memorial Complex. It is strange that the author of the video did not know this. Not a single grave will be lost, since everything was marked on the map by the surveyor,” the statement says.
There was also an official statement released that stated something similar, all part of a beautification project.