Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the creation of “volunteer units” with the former commander of the Wagner paramilitary group, Andrei Troshev, on Thursday night, the Kremlin revealed today.
The meeting was also attended by the Russian Deputy Minister of Defense, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, responsible for the process of dismantling the mercenary company after the June rebellion.
Troshev, a retired Russian colonel known within Wagner by the pseudonym “Sedoy” (gray hair), left the mercenary group after the failure of the uprising led by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin.
According to Rybar, a pro-Russian military analyst who writes about the war in Ukraine, Troshev has since attempted to recruit Wagner members currently in Belarus, Africa and the Middle East into mercenary groups affiliated with the Russian Defense Ministry.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov confirmed this Friday to the official Russian news agency RIA Novosti that Troshev already works in the Ministry of Defense.
At the meeting on Thursday evening, Putin revealed that former commander Wagner “will participate in the formation of volunteer units that will be able to carry out various combat missions, mainly, of course, in the zone of special military operations,” it is That is, the war in Ukraine.
Troshev is under European sanctions for having been “directly involved in the group’s military operations (…) in Syria,” according to a European Union document dated late 2021.
Rybar said there is already a group of former Wagner mercenaries who have recently begun returning to the front near the occupied Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, in the eastern Donetsk region.
The core of this unit, estimated at about 500 combatants, will join the mercenary group Redut and the so-called Volunteer Corps of the Russian Ministry of Defense, the analyst added.
The rest of the mercenaries will be negotiating, through Wagner’s new leader, Anton Yelizarov, a possible inclusion in detachments of the Russian National Guard.
The Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, will soon consider a bill that would allow the National Guard to include “voluntary formations.”
The leader of the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, died in late August in a plane crash between Moscow and St. Petersburg, along with several members of his personal security team.
Source: TSF
