Ukraine and Poland say Wagner fighters arrive in Belarus

Jul 16 (Reuters) – Fighters from the Wagner group have arrived in Belarus from Russia, Ukrainian and Polish officials said on Saturday, a day after Minsk said mercenaries were training the country’s soldiers southeast of the capital.

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

Some Wagner fighters have been in Belarus since at least Tuesday, two sources close to the fighters told Reuters.

The Belarusian Ministry of Defense published a video on Friday, showing what he said were Wagner fighters instructing Belarusian soldiers at a military camp near the town of Osipovichi.

Wagner’s transfer to Belarus was part of a deal that ended the group’s attempted mutiny in June, when they seized control of a Russian military headquarters, marched on Moscow and threatened to plunge Russia into civil war, the president said. Vladimir Putin.

Wagner’s boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has not been seen in public since he left the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don late on June 24.

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

“There may be several hundred of them right now,” Zaryn said on Twitter.

Poland said this month that it was reinforcing its border with Belarus to deal with any potential threats.

Although he did not send his own troops into Ukraine, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko allowed Moscow to use Belarusian territory to launch its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and has since allowed his country to be used as a base for Russian nuclear weapons.

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

He said the vehicles, including trucks, vans, vans and buses, had license plates from the self-styled Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics in what is internationally recognized 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 a Wagner column appeared to be headed for Tsel in central Belarus, where foreign journalists were shown a camp with hundreds of empty tents last week.

Reuters was unable to independently verify the Belarusian Hajun report. There was no immediate comment from Russia or Belarus on the reports.

Written by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne and Mark Trevelyan in London;

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