Lithuanian president says Wagner soldiers may come as migrants from Belarus

Wagner mercenaries may pose as irregular migrants from Belarus and the EU must be ready for that, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda has told Politico. He admits, however, that there is no evidence of Wagner troops moving to Belarus after their leader Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko announced earlier this week that Prigozhin had arrived in his country.

“One day those illegal migrants could be Wagner fighters. Are we prepared for such kind of challenge?” the Lithuanian president told the Politico podcast. “We do not have the right to reject such a possibility.”

Lithuania faced an intensification of irregular migration from across its border with Belarus in 2021. Over 4,000 migrants, mostly from the Middle East and Africa, crossed into Lithuania before the country instituted pushbacks.

Since then, border guards have pushed back almost 20,600 people. While Lithuanian officials called this a hybrid attack orchestrated by the Minsk regime, local and international rights groups as well as the European Court of Human Rights said the practise violates human rights.

President Nauseda admitted he had no intelligence information about the presence of Wagner troops in Belarus, apart from Prigozhin himself, but insisted that the West must be prepared.

“This shows that we have to be prepared, we have to understand that illegal migration or instrumentalised migration in the hands of tyrants, like Alexander Lukashenko or Vladimir Putin, is a different kind of migration. This requires decisions that are suitable for this kind of migration,” he said.

Prigozhin moved to Belarus as part of an agreement to end the mutiny in Russia.

Last weekend, Wagner troops, which were part of Russia’s military forces in Ukraine, took control of military bases in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and threatened to overthrow the country’s military leadership. However, Prigozhin eventually took a U-turn on his announced march on Moscow.

The Kremlin then announced that Prigozhin would leave for Belarus and Wagner’s mercenaries who took part in the mutiny were also allowed to move to this country.