In a meeting with Vladimir Putin on Sunday, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko reportedly suggested that members of the Wagner mercenary group would like to pay a visit to Poland, in a veiled threat against a NATO country.
Lukashenko, who took in members of the Wagner Private Military Company following the dramatic and short-lived apparent coup attempt by mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin in June, suggested that the guns for hire may be interested in marching west to Poland, Russian state media RT reports.
According to the Belarusian strongman, the Wagner forces want to “go on tour to Poland” and pay a visit to the capital of Warsaw and the city of Rzeszow, which has become a Western military hub amid the war through which weapons and hardware are shipped to Ukraine.
“They know where the military hardware [to support Ukrainian troops] came from during the fighting in Artyomovsk (Bakhmut),” Lukashenko continued in his meeting with Putin. “So they have this internal feeling that Rzeszow is trouble.”
Following the alleged coup attempt by Prighozhin last month, President Putin offered the rank and file of Wagner with the option to either join the Russian military, retire, or relocate to Belarus.
Since then, it has been reported that Wagner mercenaries are actively training Belarusian troops as well as conduction joint drills along the Polish border at the city of Brest. A Wagner commander claimed this week that some 10,000 of the groups fighters are set to be deployed to Belarus.
In response to the apparent buildup on the border, Polish Defence Minister Mariusz Blaszczak announced on Thursday that he had commanded a redeployment of troops to the border city of Biala Podlaska, which sits around 45 kilometers (28 miles) west of Brest.
“We must bear in mind that bringing a few thousand of Wagner’s forces into Belarus poses a threat to our country, hence my decision to move some military units from Poland’s west to Poland’s east,” Blaszczak said. “Their task it is to train and to deter an aggressor, it is to show Russia that Poland’s border should not be crossed, that it would not pay off to attack Poland.”
In his meeting with Vladimir Putin on Sunday, Belarusian President Lukashenko also claimed that talk of admitting Ukraine into NATO was nothing more than a “smokescreen” for the country to be partitioned and for some of its territory to be given to Poland.
“The dismemberment of Ukraine and the transfer of its lands to Poland are unacceptable. Should people in Western Ukraine ask us then we will provide support to them,” Lukashenko told Putin according to state media BelTA.
“If the need in such support arises, if western Ukraine asks us for help, then we will provide assistance and support to people in western Ukraine. If this happens, we will support them in every possible way.”
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