Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said on Thursday that the leader of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is still in Russia despite the agreement concluded with the Kremlin to move him to Minsk after leading an armed rebellion last month.
“As far as Prigozhin is concerned, he is in St. Petersburg, not in Belarus,” Lukashenko told reporters working for foreign media during a news conference, according to Agence France-Presse.
For his part, the Al-Hurra TV correspondent in Moscow quoted Lukashenko as saying that the “Wagner” company had been offered to accommodate its members in former military camps, adding that they have a “different vision”, but without specifying what that vision is or its content.
Earlier this week, Ukraine’s chief prosecutor told Reuters that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent statements about the payments to Wagner “served as direct evidence” that the Russian private military group was an illegal arm of the Russian military in the war.
Putin said earlier that the Wagner Group and its founder, Prigozhin, received about $2 billion from Russia last year.
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andrei Kostin made the remarks in The Hague, where he was attending the opening of the International Center for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression on Monday.
Kostin said his office concluded that Prigozhin was a suspect in investigations this year and that Wagner fighters were responsible for some of the most serious war crimes since the invasion on Feb. 24, 2022.
Costin added that Russia is trying to distinguish between Wagner’s forces and its regular army, but Putin’s comments last week about spending from the state budget on Wagner were “direct evidence that they were not there de facto but rather, it is also likely, that they are part of the Russian army illegally.” “. Here it should be noted that the use of mercenaries by states in armed conflicts is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.
Costin said Wagner’s forces committed many atrocities out of more than 93,000 possible war crimes his office is investigating.
“It is among the most heinous crimes against our civilians and prisoners of war,” he added.
He said that the Wagner Group not only poses a threat to Ukraine, but also to peace and security in many countries, some of which are in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.
Costin called on allies, including the United States and Britain, to designate Wagner a terrorist organization so that it could be prosecuted and its assets frozen.
He said: “Prigozhin is already suspected of involvement in criminal acts in Ukraine, but the main thing is to stop the activity of such groups.”
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2023-07-06 08:50:12
