With news of the “Wagner” group training the Belarusian special forces a few miles from the border with Poland, the latter announced that it was ready for “different scenarios according to the development of the situation,” according to what was reported by the “Wagner” newspaper.The Independent” British.
The comments from Warsaw came in conjunction with the transfer of about 1,000 of its soldiers towards the border earlier this month.
Later, the official Polish Press Agency quoted the Secretary of the country’s Security Committee, Zbigniew Hoffman, on Friday, as saying that it was decided to move military formations from the west of the country to the east due to potential threats associated with the presence of the Wagner Group in Belarus.
The head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, appeared in a video clip, on Wednesday, welcoming his fighters to Belarus, telling them that they would not participate in the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine at the present time, explaining that they were gathering their strength in order to focus on Africa, during the training of the Belarusian army.
Prigozhin, who agreed to move to Belarus as part of a deal to end an armed insurrection he launched late last month in order to gain access to Moscow, said what was happening with Russian forces on the Ukraine front was a “disgrace” and that his group did not want to be part of it, he said.
Minsk published pictures of Wagner masked trainers training Belarusian soldiers to use armored vehicles and drones.
“The Armed Forces of Belarus continue joint training operations with fighters of the private military company Wagner,” the Belarusian Ministry of Defense said in a statement.
“This week, Special Operations Forces units, together with company representatives, will perform combat training missions in the Brest Military Range,” which is just three miles (5 kilometers) east of the Polish border, she added.
According to claims in a post by a senior Wagner commander, known by his nom de guerre Marx, which was re-broadcast by Wagner’s Telegram channel, up to 10,000 fighters “have gone or will go” to Belarus, although the accuracy of this statement is difficult to verify.
On the other hand, the Polish Ministry of Defense said that the country’s borders are secure, while the Kremlin tried to portray the deployment of more Polish forces as an “aggressive” step.
“Poland’s aggressiveness is an existing fact,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, adding, “Such a hostile attitude towards Belarus and the Russian Federation requires increased attention on our part.”
As part of the deal that ended Wagner’s 24-hour mutiny, the mercenaries could move to Belarus in return for dropping the charges against them.
The mutiny exposed cracks in the power of Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, nearly 18 months after an invasion that the Kremlin had originally assumed would last only weeks.
The attempted mutiny began after weeks of complaints by Prigozhin about the state of the war in Ukraine, with him being careful to say his anger was aimed at Russia’s top military officers and the country’s defense ministry, not Putin himself.
During those complaints, he expressed his belief that his fighters were not supported during the heavy fighting around the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine.
According to the leader of the “Marx” mercenary group, Wagner lost 22,000 of its members during their participation in the war on Ukraine, while 40,000 were wounded.
Marx said that a total of 78,000 Wagner men took part in what he described as the “Ukrainian Work Trip”, including 49,000 prisoners.
He pointed out that more than 10,000 fighters “have gone or will go to Belarus.”
The leader’s words contradicted Russian statements in which he stated that approximately 33,000 Wagner fighters had signed contracts with the Ministry of Defense, and here Marx says sarcastically: “If the dead of the group returned from the dead, the number may be correct.”
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2023-07-21 06:10:13
