The logo of the Russian mercenary Wagner in a picture taken on November 4, 2022 in St. Petersburg.
Paris – Russia's Wagner (transliterated Vagnerov) group, whose mercenaries are fighting alongside the regular Russian army in Ukraine, is a worrisome rival and represents a model sure to develop. This was said by the Chief of the General Staff of the Land Forces of the French Army, Pierre Schill. He called the paramilitary organization an example of a tool of hybrid warfare, writes AFP.
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Wagner's group once operated in secret, and its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, previously even denied that the organization existed. Now, however, the oligarch with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin is speaking quite openly about her involvement in Ukraine. Prigozhin's mercenaries have in the past promoted Moscow's interests in the Middle East and parts of Africa, and today they are leading the Russian offensive near Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. meeting with journalists. According to him, the group is trying to win “its place in the Kremlin” and shows that it is a “feared enemy”. The militia “is capable of paying a very high price in blood,” Schill said.
He was apparently referring to reports of high losses in Russian operations in which Wagner's group is involved. At the weekend, CNN published interviews with two Russians who joined the militia from a Russian prison, where Prigozhin had been recruiting new fighters in recent months. The men captured by the Ukrainians late last year described witnessing dozens of deaths in a few weeks at the front, including an incident in which the command executed a man who refused to carry out an order to attack.
Schill described the Wagners as the type of tool, which is moving on the edge of war conflict and “will necessarily develop”. “Are all private military organizations asserting themselves or will they assert themselves? Probably not, there is a degree of state support,” she quoted a French general as saying to AFP.
“We are probably at the same turning point as when the Berlin Wall came down. .. There is a new questioning of international law in the form that crystallized after World War II. A number of countries are telling us: 'Your law is optional, Western, we will question it,'” Schill said.
