Russian mercenaries pull out of Africa, ready for Ukraine

The Russian mercenary group, Wagner Group, run by one of President Putin’s closest associates—is pulling dozens of battle-hardened mercenaries out of Africa to send them to Eastern Europe where Russian forces are threatening Ukraine.

According to two senior military officers in the Central African Republic (CAR) unprecedented numbers of Wagner mercenaries left the country for Eastern Europe in January and more are preparing to leave in the coming weeks.

The move comes at a time when Ukrainian authorities have said Russia is boosting supplies of weapons, ammunition and military equipment to separatist regions in Ukraine while actively recruiting mercenaries to fight in the ongoing conflict. Kyiv’s military intelligence service said last week that Moscow was undertaking “active recruitment of mercenaries” who are being sent to separatist-controlled regions.

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Some have called Wagner Putin’s “private army.” It is often dispatched undercover to regions where Russia denies having any official military presence.

It’s not the first time the Wagner Group has re-deployed private Special Forces soldiers from Africa or other combat zones in line with Putin’s evolving foreign policy objectives—despite Kremlin denials that Wagner has any links to the Russian government.

An investigation by Bellingcat published in November found that more than 200 Russians had been sent to Belarus to destabilize the country in the run-up to its August 2020 presidential elections from other hotspots where the Wagner Group was deployed, including CAR.

If Putin was asking his friends at Wagner to increase the destabilization inside Ukraine, it would be likely that some of those Russian mercenaries would be drafted in from sub-Saharan Africa.

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More than 1,000 Russians are deployed to CAR by the Wagner Group, which first gained international notoriety in Ukraine at the height of the 2014 incursion when they were accused of war crimes.

The organization was founded by Dmitry Utkin, who was once a member of the Russian Special Forces and is currently under U.S. sanctions for aiding Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.

The group has recruited many of its mercenaries from the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU, and its founder, Utkin (nickname: “Wagner”), is a veteran of the GRU’s elite Spetsnaz special-operations forces.