The President of Belarus, Alexandr Lukashenko, today expressed his concern that the Wagner Group mercenaries who are stationed in his country want to advance to Warsaw due to Poland’s support for the Ukrainian Army.
“Maybe I shouldn’t say it, but I will. The Wagnerites have started to worry us. ‘We want to go to the West, give us permission.’ And I tell them, why do you want to go to the West? ‘To go on an excursion to Warsaw, to Rzeszow,'” Lukashenko said at the start of the meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Constantine Palace in St. Petersburg.
Lukashenko assured his colleague that Minsk will keep the Wagnerites at the Moguiliov base as agreed after the failed armed rebellion led by said group a month ago and that it will not allow them to move, since their “state of mind is bad.”
“(Although) It must be recognized that they know what is happening around the State Union,” he said.
He stressed that Russian mercenaries fought in the city of Bakhmut against Ukrainian units equipped with Western weapons that arrived by plane at the Polish airfield in Rzeszow.
In turn, he denounced that Poland has deployed a brigade about 40 kilometers from the city of Brest and another about a hundred kilometers from Grodno, when before these units were about 500 kilometers from Belarusian territory.
Lukashenko was also opposed to the alleged Warsaw plans denounced by Moscow regarding the occupation of western Ukraine, an option he considered “unacceptable”.
Under the agreement that put an end to the uprising of June 23-24, Wagner’s boss Yevgeny Prigozhin agreed to move to Belarus, while the mercenaries had two options: return home, accompany him or subordinate themselves to the Ministry of Defense.
After several weeks of uncertainty, on July 14 the Belarusian Ministry of Defense announced the arrival of the first Wagner columns.
This week, on July 19, Prigozhin posted a video from Belarus welcoming the mercenaries, assuring them that they will return to Africa, although he did not rule out a future return to the battlefield in Ukraine.
During their stay, the Russian mercenaries will turn the Belarusian Army into the “second in the world,” Prigozhin predicted, and “if necessary and necessary, we will come out in their defense,” he added.
The next day, the Belarusian Armed Forces reported joint training with the Wagnerites on the border with Poland, which immediately announced the dispatch of two military units to the area.
In total, there are now a few thousand mercenaries in the former Soviet republic, although Wagner estimates that that number will soon reach 10,000.
Wagner maintains that there are currently 25,000 mercenaries “alive and healthy”, to which are added the wounded who are recovering.
The Polish Foreign Ministry summoned the Russian ambassador to the country after Putin’s remarks during the meeting of the Russian Security Council on Friday.
Then, Putin assured that the Polish western regions had been “a gift from Stalin” and warned Warsaw that an attack on Minsk would mean aggression against Russia. EFE
