Wagner Group mercenaries in the Ukrainian city of Soledar.
Mercenaries supplied by the notorious Wagner Group are being redeployed to Russia’s southwestern Kursk region to support efforts by the Russian military to push back an Armed Forces of Ukraine incursion into Russian territory that is already in its third day.
"Didn’t I say there would be some good news? So here you go — Wagner Group fighters are returning to Russia," pro-war blogger Yegor Guzenko, better known by his alias Thirteen, wrote on his Telegram channel Thirteenth on Thursday.
Guzenko also posted a video showing a military unit in camouflage and wearing Wagner Group patches travelling in the back of an army vehicle, apparently heading to the Russian–Ukrainian border, in which one of the troops can be heard saying that the group is heading to the Kursk region, which he says “will be hot, but we have fire extinguishers.”
Pro-war Telegram channel Dva Mayora also reported the news, reposting Guzenko’s post and writing that “Wagner is going in the Kursk direction”, while Telegram news channel Mash wrote that Wagner fighters were travelling to the Kursk region “from distant lands, just as they did in 2022”.
Following the failure of the Wagner Group mutiny, led by the group’s co-founder Yevgeny Prigozhin in June 2023, about 10,000 Wagner mercenaries were allowed to move to Belarus, while those that decided to stay in Russia were given the option of returning to fight in Ukraine, as long as they signed a contract with the Defence Ministry.
Prigozhin was killed when his private jet crashed in suspicious circumstances just two months after his failed march on Moscow. While no longer a significant force in Ukraine, the Wagner Group still wields considerable influence in Africa, where various governments have hired Wagner mercenaries to shore up their power.
