Putin asks a senior Wagner Group official to form "volunteer units" for "combat missions" in Ukraine

MADRID, 29 Sep. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, has called on a senior official of the Wagner Group to form "volunteer units" to carry out "combat missions" within the framework of the invasion of Ukraine, unleashed in February 2022.

The request was conveyed on Thursday to retired colonel Andrei Troshev, whom he proposed in July as the new leader of the Wagner Group to replace Yevgeni Prigozhin, who at the end of June commanded an attempted rebellion and who died in a plane crash in August.

"During the last meeting, we talked about the fact that we will participate in the formation of volunteer units that can carry out various combat missions mainly, of course, in the zone of the special military operation," Putin said, as reported by this Friday the Russian news agency Interfax.

"You yourself fought in one of these units for more than a year. You know what it is like, how it is done. You know the issues that must be resolved in advance so that combat work works in the best way," he added at the meeting, in which the Russian Deputy Minister of Defense Yunus-Bek Evkurov was also present.

Likewise, he proposed addressing issues related to support programs for volunteers participating in the invasion of Ukraine. "Social guarantees must be the same for everyone. For the country and the homeland there is no difference about the status in which a person fought and defended the homeland," she said.

The spokesperson for the Eastern Group of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Ilia Yevlash, assured on Wednesday that the mercenaries of the Wagner Group have returned from Belarus to the occupied areas where they had a presence on the eastern flank, although he clarified that they do not represent a important threat.

For his part, the main advisor to the Presidency of Ukraine, Mijailo Podoliak, contradicted the spokesman for the Armed Forces by assuring that "Wagner no longer exists", since this group of mercenaries "ended with the liquidation" of Prigozhin and Dimitri Utkin. , also killed in the aforementioned plane crash.