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Wagner fighters relocating to Belarus after their failed mutiny in Russia could use migrants from Africa and other places where the paramilitary group operates to destabilise central and eastern Europe, a Polish security chief has warned.
Jacek Siewiera, the head of Poland’s national bureau of security, said on Friday that “the risk for Poland is correlated with the number of Wagner mercenaries who stay in Minsk”.
The threat, he added, should be measured “in combination with all the assets that Wagner has in Africa, in the Maghreb, in the Sahel and the Middle East and the risk of escalating the forced immigration and asymmetric attack on the borders of Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.”
Poland and the Baltic states already announced that they would bolster their border troops after Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko brokered a truce with Wagner warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose insurrection attempt was the most direct challenge to Vladimir Putin since he became Russia’s leader. As part of that deal, Prigozhin agreed to stand down and fly to Minsk in return for amnesty for him and any fighters who follow him instead of joining the Russian army.
Prigozhin’s move to Belarus, confirmed by Lukashenko, added an unexpected element of instability and a possible security threat for neighbouring countries. This would be in particular a concern as his troops, mostly hardened criminals recruited from Russian prisons, get involved in human trafficking and other criminal activities.
“Can they push through more migrants? It’s possible. The question is what kind of profit they will have in that procedure because this is a group that is mostly motivated by profit,” Siewiera told the Financial Times.
Some western intelligence officials say several thousand Wagner troops are thought to have taken up Lukashenko’s offer to go to Belarus rather than join the regular Russian armed forces.
In a speech delivered to his generals on Tuesday, Lukashenko said Belarus had earmarked “an abandoned base” to station Wagner troops.
He also talked about possible benefits for the Belarusian military, notably in terms of sharing Wagner’s battlefield experience. Lukashenko called Wagner “the best-trained unit in the army,” but he warned that Prigozhin himself was “very impulsive.”
Siewiera offered a different take on Wagner’s current potential as a fighting force. “They are more similar to terrorists than an army group,” he said. “They have some very skilled and very cruel veterans who use special forces’s tactics but that is not enough to say that they have the capability of an army.”
Poland is fearful of a repeat of 2021, when the EU accused Lukashenko of staging a hybrid war by luring tens of thousands of migrants on direct flights from countries such as Iraq and facilitating their attempts to cross over the border to the bloc. EU officials at the time said the surge in migration had been masterminded by Lukashenko in retaliation for western support for Belarus’s exiled opposition and for sanctions imposed on Minsk.
To stop the migrants, Poland last year built a new fence along a section of its border with Belarus, which Warsaw calls a protective wall.
While Belarus “hasn’t been bringing more migrants into Poland” for now, Siewiera said “there are more attempts at storming the border, especially where we have the wall. It is not as intensive as it was at its peak in 2021 but it’s a significant increase”.
Additional reporting by Lucy Fisher in London