Wagner Group Commander Yevgeny Prigozhin is alive and well and making big plans for the mercenary group, according to a video posted on Wagner-linked Telegram video channels on Wednesday. In the video, his first public appearance since last month’s failed mutiny against Russian military leaders, Prigozhin addresses a twilight crowd of men who appear to be Wagner fighters, welcoming them to Belarus, the Guardian reports. He tells them that Wagner will not return to Ukraine for now. “We’ve done a lot for Russia,” he said, per Politico. “What is happening at the front right now is a disgrace. We don’t want to be part of it.”
Prigozhin says the group’s fighters will stay in Belarus “for a while” and train the country’s military before “taking a new path to Africa”, where the group is active in several countries. “Right now we will make the Belarusian army the second most powerful in the world and, if necessary, we will take its place,” he said. Also featured in the video is Prigozhin MP Dmitry Utkin, whose callsign the group was named after. “This is not the end, this is just the beginning of the greatest work in the world, which will continue very soon,” he said, switching from Russian to English to add, “And welcome to hell.”
Wagner is believed to have around 2,000 fighters in Belarus. In a Telegram message, a commander said another 10,000 were on their way. Wagner’s fighters on Thursday launched joint drills with the Belarusian military near the country’s border with Poland, prompting the Polish military to move troops to the border, AP reports. “We must bear in mind that bringing a few thousand Wagner soldiers to Belarus poses a threat to our country, hence my decision to move some military units from western Poland to eastern Poland,” Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said. (Read more stories by Yevgeny Prigozhin.)