The military command of the Russian Federation is preparing to redeploy some former members of the Wagner Group who served in the African Corps to the Belgorod region. This is stated in the report of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), UNN writes.
Details
The report cites an insider source who reported on April 15 that Lieutenant General Andrey Averyanov of the Russian Main Directorate of Military Intelligence failed to meet the Kremlin's deadline for the creation of the African Corps, controlled by the Russian Defense Ministry.
For this reason, the source reports that the Russian authorities are preparing to relocate unidentified units of the African Corps from Africa to the Belgorod region.
The current efforts of the Wagner Group to recruit personnel for its activities in Africa are actually intended to recruit personnel for deployment in the Belgorod region. Russian soldiers of the African Corps arrived in Niger on April 12, and it is not yet known whether the group will completely cease its activities in Africa or whether only some units of the African Corps will be redeployed to the area of the Ukrainian-Russian border,
It is noted that Averyanov had previously participated in a Russian delegation that met with officials in Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali and appeared to be actively involved in the Russian government's efforts to take over the Wagner Group.
averianov, in particular, is the commander of GRU unit 29155. He was responsible for the 2018 assassination attempt on Sergei Skripal in the UK. A joint investigation by 60 Minutes, Der Spiegel, and The Insider recently implicated Averyanov in non-lethal attacks using directed energy or acoustic weapons against U.S. government personnel in the United States and abroad,
Recall
The United States imposed new sanctions on the Wagner PMC, the Russian Aerospace Forces, and related individuals and companies for transferring or acquiring weapons of mass destruction from Syria, Iran, and North Korea.