Serbia. The Wagner Group recruits Serbs, President Aleksandar Vucic denounces Russian mercenaries

The Wagner group recently published a video on the web in which they called for a fight in Ukraine in Serbian. It was supposed to encourage local men to take part in the war in Ukraine. After the recording was publicized in the Serbian media, President Aleksandar Vucic referred to it. – Why are you doing this? Why do you Wagnerians summon anyone from Serbia when you know it’s against our rules? – he said on January 16 on public Serbian television.

On one of the streets of the Serbian capital in mid-January there was also a graffiti with the symbol of the Wagnerians – a death’s skull. The drawing was signed by members of the People’s Patrol, a far-right organization openly supporting Russia’s actions. At the same time, however, according to the BBC, on Thursday, members of anti-war organizations in Belgrade filed a lawsuit against the Russian ambassador and the head of the Serbian state security and information agency for their alleged involvement in recruiting Serbs to the Wagner group.

The BBC reminds that Serbia’s attitude towards the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been criticized in the West from the beginning. Belgrade avoided explicitly condemning the actions of Russia, its longtime ally and sole supplier of natural gas. The Serbian authorities also delayed imposing significant sanctions on Moscow for a long time, although at the end of 2022 President Vucic, after meeting with the EU Commissioner for Neighborhood and Enlargement Oliver Verhelyi, declared that Serbia had no intention of avoiding the EU sanctions imposed on Russia.

In recent days, Aleksandar Vucic has also finally taken a firm stand on the Ukrainian territories, which are now occupied by Russian troops as a result of armed aggression. “For us, Crimea and Donbass are Ukraine,” said the Serbian president on January 18 in an interview with “Bloomberg”.

SEE ALSO: A former commander of the Wagner Group has fled Russia and wants asylum in Norway. “I’m afraid of dying in agony”

In an interview with the radio, Serbian Defense Minister Milos Vucevic reminded that Serbian citizens are not legally allowed to take part in armed conflicts between other countries and warned them against joining the troops fighting in Ukraine. He added that the intelligence services research and verify information about the possible participation of citizens of this country in the war with Ukraine on the side of Russia.

According to estimates by the Ukrainian embassy in Serbia, since December 2018, more than 300 Serbs have left for Ukraine to fight on the side of Russia. As reported by Radio Swoboda, more than 30 of them have been sentenced in Serbia for this, in most cases with minimal sentences. In addition, some of the convicted Serbs, shortly after the verdict, went back to Ukraine to continue fighting on the Russian side.

The Wagner Group is a private military company associated with the pro-Kremlin businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, recruiting soldiers for, among others, for the war in Ukraine. Since mid-December 2021, the Wagnerians have been subject to EU sanctions for torture, executions and murders, including in Libya, Syria and Donbass. The crimes of the Wagnerians in Syria were also reported in Russia by the independent Novaya Gazeta.

During the invasion of Ukraine, the Wagner group is one of the most important components of the Russian forces on particularly difficult sections of the front, including in the Donetsk region. Members of this group are regularly accused of war crimes. At the end of November 2022, the Wagnerians also had murder 19 Russian soldiers who refused to fight Ukrainian troops. A few weeks earlier, the media reported that Prigozhin he personally recruited prisoners convicted of serious crimes for the war in Ukraine, promising them pardons.

SEE ALSO: Radio Svoboda: wounded Wagnerians are being treated in a clinic in St. Petersburg associated with Putin’s daughter