The spokesman for the Ukrainian Border Guard, Andri Demchenko, confirmed today that most of the mercenaries of the Wagner group who were in Belarus have left that country, and assured that a part of them are fighting again in eastern Ukraine.
Of the more than 6,000 mercenaries that were in Belarus at the time, Demchenko told the Ukrainska Pravda publication, only half a thousand remain there.
According to the advisor to the Ukrainian presidency Mikhailo Podoliak, the mercenaries would have ended up in different places, and some of them fight with the Russian regular forces in the occupied city of Bakhmut, located in the Donetsk province of eastern Ukraine.
“The Wagner group no longer exists,” Podoliak wrote on his social media account “said the advisor to the Ukrainian presidency.
Podoliak added that “today there are only former soldiers of this terrorist group who have dispersed in all directions: Africa, civil and criminal life in regions of Russia or a contract with the Russian Ministry of Defense” to fight in Bakhmut.
The Ukrainian presidential advisor asked not to give too much importance to the redeployment of former Wagner mercenaries in that city in eastern Ukraine, and assured that the information that has appeared in this regard is a way to cover up the recent loss by Russia of the towns of Klishchivka and Andrivka, south of Bakhmut.
Wagner’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and part of his mercenaries were banished to Belarus in June after the failure of their mutiny against the Russian Ministry of Defense. Two months after the mutiny, Prigozhin died along with his right-hand man Utkin when the plane he was traveling in crashed inside Russia. Many consider his death a murder.
