Reuters: The base of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation serves for the PMC fighters a transshipment point after returning from Syria

A military camp, located near the Molkino farm 30 km from Krasnodar to the south along the M4 Don highway and is on the balance sheet of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation , is a transshipment point for soldiers of private military companies returning from Syria. It is in Molkino that mercenaries are brought from the Rostov-on-Don International Airport, Reuters reports.

The agency’s correspondents found that on April 17, in Rostov-on-Don, the Syrian charter aircraft of the CHAM Wings, which transferred the PMC fighters from Russia to Syria and vice versa.

After several dozen men left the terminal of the airport terminal through a separate exit, they were located in three buses and headed to that part of the airport that is used only by employees. There, the tractor drove luggage carts with large bags to buses. Having loaded bags on buses, PMC fighters left the airport.

Three buses left Rostov-on-Don and went south. Shortly before midnight April 17, they turned off the track to the Molkino farm, 350 km south of the airport. Having slowed down on the checkpoint, the buses drove to the camp. After 20 minutes, the buses drove off the base without passengers.

According to the agency, the buses also carried the PMC fighters to the base at Molkino from the Rostov-on-Don airport on March 25 and April 6. Journalists managed to talk with three people who own some of the buses who carried groups of men from Rostov Airport to Molkino.

According to the interlocutors of the agency, they rent buses. At the same time, they refused to say who is the tenant of vehicles. One of them suggested that a trip to Molkino could be a simple excursion.

On the eve of April 24, to the agency’s question why civilians fighting in Syria go to the military base near Krasnodar, the press secretary of the President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Peskov admitted that he did not have such information and suggested asking the Ministry of Defense. The military department, as in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, did not respond to the requests of journalists.

The fact that the camp of the most famous in the Russian Federation of a private military organization - PMC Wagner, whose fighters were noted in the Crimea, Donbass and Syria for several years, is located near the Molkino farm, since the spring of 2016 after the publication of Fontanka.

In August 2016, RBC talked about the camp in more detail, noting that the base is on the balance of the Ministry of Defense. Journalists then reached Molkino and talked with the military personnel of the 10th Brigade of the GRU of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation at the First checkpoint. However, what is happening for the checkpoint, whether the Wagner PMC camp exists and how it looks, it still remained unknown.

In March of this year, Znak.com correspondent visited the camp, showed with the fighters of the PMC and one of the residents of Molkino, who said that the "Wagnerians" appeared here about five years ago, "even before Ukraine." In the first year, none of the locals even suspected the existence of a special detachment.

The media has repeatedly written that Wagner's PMC is a unit led by the reserve lieutenant colonel Dmitry Utkin , known under the call sign Wagner. Earlier, journalists found out that PMCs were formed on the basis of the "Slavic Corps", operating in Syria in 2013. As Fontanka wrote , since the spring of 2014, PMCs were engaged in operations in the territory of Crimea and the Lugansk region, after which its fighters went to fulfill tasks in Syria.

The service in the PMC, according to the current Russian legislation, is illegal - for it threatens for seven years under Art. 359 of the Criminal Code. But in the Russian parliament they are already planning to change this.