The Russian army, in difficulty facing the Ukrainian army, has been seeking for weeks to reinforce its manpower with seasoned fighters. According to the British authorities, it would have withdrawn from African soil several hundred mercenaries from the Wagner group which operates in Libya, the Central African Republic and Mali..
“Russia has sent 1,000 mercenaries from the private Wagner group to eastern Ukraine”, indicated on March 28, 2022 the British Ministry of Defense in a situation update published on his Twitter account. “Y including senior leaders of the Wagner organization, to undertake combat operations”, the ministry said.
“Due to heavy casualties and a largely stalled invasion, Russia was most likely forced to redeploy its Wagner personnel to Ukraine at the expense of operations in Africa and Syria,” believes London.
This redeployment of the Wagners coincides with the Russian desire to dislodge the Ukrainian resistance in Mariupol and Kharkiv, two strategic cities where the fighting is likely to be fought house by house. The Wagner mercenaries, known for their expeditious methods aimed at terrorizing their adversaries, have experience in these urban combats.
“Last January, a Russian military plane secretly left Libyan lands, carrying hundreds of Wagner mercenaries on board,” says a Libyan military source quoted by the newspaper Al-Araby Al-Jadeed. According to this anonymous source, “Wagner’s fighters were withdrawn from the city of Soukna and other towns in central and eastern Libya. They were collected at the airbase (from Al-Jufrah)in the center of the country, from where they took the plane”. These Wagner soldiers were engaged from the start of the conflict with the objective of capturing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. failed attempts and several of these mercenaries reportedly killed in these early attacks.
An Egyptian military official also claimed that “Russia had not only recalled Wagner from Libya, but also from other areas in Africa”. Information confirmed by journalist Alexandra Jousset, who co-directed the documentary Wagner, Putin’s shadow army. According to her, several Wagner executives have recently left the Central African Republic and Mali.
The bulk of the Wagner troops still being in Mali. “The ruling junta in Bamako has become hostage to the mercenaries of the Russian company Wagner who engage in abuses and predation of the country’s resources”, affirmed on March 30, 2022 Jean-Yves le Drian, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, on the airwaves of RFI.
The Wagner group, which belongs to the Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman close to President Vladimir Putin, finances itself by obtaining mining operations, in particular gold and diamonds as in the Central African Republic and more recently in Mali.
So far, Bamako continues to deny the presence of Wagner’s men in the country, saying only regular Russian trainers have been deployed as part of Russia’s strengthening military partnership with Mali.
Wagner is accused of having committed acts of torture, rape and extrajudicial executions on several African grounds. The Wagner group, without legal existence, is not officially linked to Russia, but the Ukrainian conflict today reveals its true nature: an instrument in the hands of the master of the Kremlin.