Wagner mercenaries train with Belarusian military near Polish border
20 July 2023, 16:24
It follows their move to Belarus after their short-lived rebellion.
Mercenaries from Russia’s military company Wagner have launched joint drills with the Belarusian military near the border with Poland.
It follows their move to Belarus after their short-lived rebellion.
The Belarusian defence ministry said the week-long manoeuvres will be conducted at a firing range near the border city of Brest and involve Belarusian special forces.
The ministry said Wagner’s combat experience will help modernise the Belarusian military.
A video released on Wednesday appeared to show Wagner’s chief Yevgeny Prigozhin for the first time since he led last month’s rebellion.
In the video, Mr Prigozhin was seen telling his troops they will spend some time in Belarus training its military to help “make the Belarusian army the second strongest army in the world” before deploying to Africa.
In addition to their involvement in Ukraine, Wagner mercenaries have been sent to Syria and several African countries since the private army was created in 2014.
In his revolt, which began on June 23 and lasted less than 24 hours, Mr Prigozhin’s mercenaries captured the military headquarters in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don without firing a shot and then moved as close as 125 miles of Moscow.
The mutiny faced little resistance and the mercenaries downed at least six military helicopters and a command post aircraft, killing at least 10 airmen.
Mr Prigozhin had called it a “march of justice” to oust defence minister Sergei Shoigu and general staff chief General Valery Gerasimov, who demanded that Wagner forces sign contracts with the defence ministry.
He ordered his troops back to their camps after Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko brokered a deal to end the rebellion in exchange for an amnesty for Mr Prigozhin and his fighters and a permission to relocate to Belarus.
The revolt posed the most serious threat to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 23-year rule, eroding his authority and exposing the government’s weakness.
Belaruski Hajun, a Belarusian activist group monitoring troops’ movements in Belarus, said nine convoys with more than 2,000 Wagner mercenaries have already rolled into the country.
A Wagner commander said in a statement posted on a messaging app channel linked to the company that about 10,000 Wagner troops are set to deploy to Belarus.
Satellite images showed a convoy of vehicles at the base near Tsel in the Asipovichy region of Belarus, about 55 miles southeast of Minsk, which the Belarusian authorities offered to Wagner.
Belarus’s opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who was forced to leave the country after challenging Mr Lukashenko in a 2020 election that the opposition and the West denounced as fraudulent, said Wagner’s deployment to Belarus will destabilise the country and threaten its neighbours.
“The arrival of Wagner will add to instability and no one will feel safe with these war criminals roaming the country,” she said.
“They are extremely dangerous and their unpredictability raises the threat for Belarusians and our neighbours.”
Polish defence minister Mariusz Blaszczak said on Thursday he has ordered some troops to be moved from the country’s west to Biala Podlaska, around 28 miles west from Brest, and in Kolno, further north.
“We must bear in mind that bringing a few thousand of Wagner’s forces into Belarus poses a threat to our country, hence my decision to move some military units from Poland’s west to Poland’s east,” Mr Blaszczak said on state Radio 1.
“Their task it is to train and to deter an aggressor, it is to show Russia that Poland’s border should not be crossed, that it would not pay off to attack Poland.”
Poland is a Nato member.
Some of the strong rhetoric could be attributed to early campaigning before parliamentary elections expected in the autumn, in which the ruling right-wing Law and Justice party is expected to lose its control of the parliament.
