The Russian military vandalised a military cemetery in the village of Chmyrivka, Starobilsk district, Luhansk Region, by wrapping black film around the monuments on the graves of fallen Ukrainian defenders.
A local website published photos from the cemetery, showing that most of the monuments in the military cemetery were wrapped in black film. In this way, all information about the fallen was concealed. Given the date of the photo’s publication, the Russians carried out the act before Easter.
The photographs also show that part of the cemetery has been dug up and completely abandoned. The Starobilsk district of Luhansk Region was occupied by Russian forces at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, in March 2022. Immediately after the occupation, media reports stated that militants removed Ukrainian flags from the monuments — there were at least fifty of them in the cemetery. The first graves of soldiers who gave their lives defending Donetsk and Luhansk Regions appeared here in 2014.
