Alexander Lavrichenko

Position Unclear - Rank Unclear

Unit: 810th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade, Black Sea Fleet, Southern Military District

See the bottom of this page for details about his rank and position

Cargo ID: #92

Full Name: Alexander Pavlovich Lavrichenko

Russian Name: Лавриченко Александр Павлович

Date of Birth: August 13th, 1984 (age: 37 years)

Education: Mikhailovskaya Military Artillery Academy (2009-2014)

Awards: Order of Courage (ph.), Medal "For Merit", Medal "For Participation in the Military Parade on Victory Day" (x2), Medal "Participant of the Military Operation in Syria"

Previous Deployments: Syria

Difficulty Clarifying Alexander's Rank

Alexander is something of an oddity. We have a first hand source, his father, stating his rank was Senior Lieutenant, but visual and contextual evidence indicate otherwise. For example, in his portrait below (as well as his family photo above) one can clearly see two red lines on his epaulettes. On Russian military uniforms, these double lines indicate a senior officer (Major, Lt. Colonel, and Colonel). Junior officers (Lieutenant, Senior Lieutenant, and Captain) have a single line up the center:

His father also sows further confusion saying:

Since childhood, Sasha dreamed of becoming a professional military man and pilot, like his maternal grandfather. He graduated from the Neklinovsky flight school, took exams at the Yeisk flight school, but did not pass the competition. 

He served in military service in 2009 in Sevastopol. He returned there in 2014, having received a military specialty at the St. Petersburg Military Artillery Academy, as a platoon commander of a rocket battery. He told his family very sparingly about his work, even to me, his father,” recalls Pavel Vladimirovich.

Alexander was no stranger to the battlefield. As a commander of a military police platoon,  he participated in a military operation against terrorists in Syria. he stayed there for four months.

Senior Lieutenant would be an appropriate rank for the commander of a rocket artillery platoon, though it would be quite strange for him to move from that specialty into the Military Police. Especially after performing well enough to be awarded the medal "For Merit" as well as being asked to participate in two separate parades. It would also be rather unusual for someone who was a senior lieutenant back in 2014, and earned such awards, to not advance in rank at all over the following 8 years.

The plaque does little to clear things up for us. It appears to be privately commissioned by either his family or his old school (or more likely both). It makes the same claim his father did, that he was a Senior Lieutenant, but it also states that he was brigade commander. In fact, Colonel Alexey Sharov [Cargo ID #82] was commander of the brigade until he died one week prior to Alexander's death. It stretches credulity to think command passed from a Colonel to a Senior Lieutenant upon Sharov's death. We have not yet found any hard evidence to suggest command of the 810th transferred to Alexander even briefly, no matter his actual rank. We believe this to be another "lost in translation" situation, where the plaque means to say Alexander was a commander within the brigade, not of the brigade.

Our Conclusion

We believe, pending further evidence in any direction, that Alexander's father either calls Lieutenant Colonels "Senior Lieutenants" (e.g. the senior of the lieutenants), or did not keep up with his son's promotions. Given Alexander's time in service, his education level, his age, his uniform, and his awards, it seems most likely he was some type of senior officer. If he was a Senior Officer, Lieutenant Colonel makes the most sense with everything his father said.

Even though the "objective" evidence suggests he was likely a senior officer, we don't have enough to confidently say Alexander's father didn't even know his own son's rank. It's possible there is some peculiarity about the Russian marine corp uniform that escapes us, and we are reading his epaulettes incorrectly. It's also possible that Alexander was blacklisted from any promotion for 8 years, remaining a Senior Lieutenant from 2014-2022.

For now we are going to mark Alexander as an official Cargo 200, but we are not going to give him a specific rank until we can find better evidence one way or another.