Ukraine, Poland say Wagner fighters arrive in Belarus

Fighters from the Wagner group landed in Belarus from Russia on Saturday, according to Ukrainian and Polish sources, a day after Minsk announced the mercenaries were training the country’s army southeast of the city.

“Wagner is in Belarus,” Andriy Demchenko, a spokesman for the Ukrainian border agency, said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app. He said the movement of “separate groups” from Russia had been observed in Belarus.

Wagner fighters have been in Belarus since at least Tuesday, according to two individuals close to the fighters.

On Friday, the Belarusian defence ministry published a video purportedly showing Wagner fighters advising Belarusian soldiers at a military range near the town of Osipovichi.

Wagner’s relocation to Belarus was part of a settlement that halted the group’s mutiny attempt in June, when they took possession of a Russian military headquarters, marched on Moscow, and threatened to bring Russia to the brink of civil war, according to President Vladimir Putin.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner head, has not been seen in public since leaving the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don late on 24 June.

Poland’s deputy minister coordinator of special services, Stanislaw Zaryn, said Warsaw also has confirmation of Wagner fighters’ presence in Belarus.

“There may be several hundred of them at the moment,” Zaryn said on Twitter.

Poland said this month it was bolstering its border with Belarus to address any potential threats.

While not sending his own troops to Ukraine, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko allowed Moscow to use Belarusian territory to launch its full-scale invasion on Ukraine in February 2022 and has since let his country be used as a base for Russian nuclear weapons.

The Belarusian Hajun project, which monitors military activity in the country and which is viewed as an extremist formation by Belarusian authorities, said a large column of at least 60 vehicles entered Belarus overnight Friday from Russia.

It said the vehicles, including trucks, pickups, vans and buses, had licence plates of the self-styled Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics in what is internationally recognised as eastern Ukraine. In a move widely condemned as illegal, Moscow moved last year to annex the republics, which have been Russian proxies since 2014.

Hajun said it appeared that a Wagner column was headed to Tsel in central Belarus, where foreign reporters were last week shown a camp with hundreds of empty tents.

Reuters could not independently verify the Belarusian Hajun report. There was no immediate comment from Russia or Belarus on the reports.