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Wagner Group - Molkino Farm Krasnodar

The Wagner Group trains in camp on a rural highway in Molkino, Krasnodar, down the road from a GRU spetsnaz training camp. Reuters published a new investigation into a facility near the Molkino farm near Krasnodar that is said to be used to train private military company fighters before they are sent to Syria. The barracks, which are located outside the perimeter of the military base of the Russian Ministry of Defense near Molkino - three two-story buildings - according to the documents are designated as a pioneer camp, according to an investigation by Reuters journalists. According to the agency, the construction of buildings that are not formally related to the Russian Ministry of Defense was carried out by the Megaline company, associated with the Concord company of businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, close to President Vladimir Putin.

The authors of the Reuters investigation were unable to find out what role Prigozhin played in the construction of this camp and whether he played it at all, as well as how Megaline was chosen for construction and what is the origin of the money paid for the construction of the barracks.

The existence of the buildings was revealed in court documents that surfaced during the lawsuit between Megaline and his subcontractor called Sevzapstroy, who was involved in the construction. In its decision, the court describes one of the buildings as a “pioneer camp,” although the pioneer organization ceased to exist with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the word “pioneer” was dropped from the names of summer camps for children. Two other buildings are called buildings for "temporary accommodation of vacationers."

As a source of this information, the court named an agreement between Sevzapstroy and another company, which was called TD Vivahouse and acted as a subcontractor in the project. One of the employees of Vivahaus, a construction firm that was hired to do part of the work, told Reuters that the fictitious purpose of the building in official documents was named at the request of the customer.

“There was such a special order, so it had to be like this. We had an agreement with the customer that we write that this is a wonderful pioneer camp near the Black Sea,” he said, asking not to mention his name in connection with a sensitive topic. He did not specify who exactly it was, his direct client Sevzapstroy or the customer of the Megaline construction.

Russian independent online media znak.com reporter Igor Pushkarev photographed the alleged base of the Kremlin-linked "Wagner private military company" near Molkino, Krasnodar region.... Landsat-8 satellite imagery of the base shows that the construction started during the period between November 2014 and March 2015, 3 barracks buildings were completed by late June 2015, and by March 2016 the base had expanded to its current area. However, a local from Molkino told Znak that "Wagner" had appeared there in 2013, "before [the war in] Ukraine"

The investigative group Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) in March 2018 confirmed the authenticity of images of the base of the "private Russian military company Wagner" in the Krasnodar Territory, which was published by Znak.com. CIT, having studied satellite images, found out that the construction of the Wagner PMC base in Molkin began in November 2014 and ended no later than March 2016.

CIT, having studied satellite images, found out that the construction of the Wagner PMC base near the Molkino farm began in November 2014 and ended no later than March 2016. At the same time, Znak.com, citing local residents , reported that for the first time mercenaries appeared in Molkino back in 2013, that is, before the start of the war in Donbass, in which, presumably, the Wagner PMC was used for the first time.

A messaging app channel linked to the contractor ran a video on 17 July 2023 showing Russian and Wagner flags lowered at the mercenaries’ main home base in Molkino in the Krasnodar region in southern Russia. The channel said that the base would fully close on July 30, and one of the mercenaries in the video declared that Wagner was moving to unspecified new locations. Wagner also had used camps in the Russia-occupied Luhansk region of Ukraine.