The grave of Lieutenant Colonel Grigory Vladimirovich Tarasenko appeared at the city cemetery of Krasnodar with the date of death March 23, 2022. A photo of the grave was provided to Mediazona by a reader who visited the cemetery.
Grigory Tarasenko until 2013 was commandermilitary unit 55485 — up to its formal liquidation. This unit is the 243rd combined-arms training ground, better known as Molkino. Wagner PMC fighters have been training there since mid-2015.
Grave of Grigory Tarasenko. Photo: Mediazona
Grigory Tarasenko was 45 years old, in the photo on the monument he is in uniform, in most of the photos on social networks he is also in military uniform. It is not known whether his death was related to the war in Ukraine, his death was not officially reported.
Grigory Tarasenko (on the right). Photo: personal page «VKontakte»
The Molkino training ground, located between the cities of Krasnodar and Goryachiy Klyuch, became known as the headquarters of the Wagner PMC in 2015. Then it turned out that the Ministry of Defense allocated more than 1 billion rubles for the arrangement of military units located in the immediate vicinity of the training ground.
In 2018, a chapel appeared near the training ground, built in honor of the fallen Wagner PMC fighters. On the territory surrounded by a fence, there is a monument to a man in a military uniform without identification marks, which is recognized as the commander of the Wagner PMC Dmitry Utkin. Similar sculptures have been erected in Lugansk and the Syrian city of Hama, the Russian service of the BBC noted. The journalists failed to enter the fenced area. The construction of the chapel was carried out by companies associated with businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Wagner PMC was allegedly founded in 2014. The mercenaries took part in the war in Donbass on the side of the LPR and DPR, and later fought in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic and Sudan. Officials deny the participation of Wagner mercenaries in the wars waged by Russia.
“I think that the talk about the presence of Wagner” in Ukraine are due precisely to the desire to divert attention from what our Western colleagues are doing, ”said Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in an interview with the Italian TV channel Mediaset. — «"Wagner" is a private military company that has nothing to do with the Russian state.”