By Athena Papakosta

Mercenaries of the Wagner Group are back on the front lines in Ukraine. According to a senior Ukrainian military official, several hundred members of the mercenary organization are again in eastern Ukraine.

The news was initially broadcast by the American network CNN citing Ukrainian soldiers fighting around Bakhmut. Then the European edition of Politico took over, citing statements from a Ukrainian military official, as well as the Reuters news agency.

Group Wagner fighters played a key role in the nine-month siege of the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, one of the bloodiest and fiercest battles of Russia’s 19-month-old war in the country.

After the armed rebellion of the Wagner group last June led by Yevgeny Prigozhin – who was killed last August when the plane he was on crashed – many of its members either crossed over to Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus or were deployed in different African countries where Moscow has interests.

However, in the previous days there were not a few Russian military bloggers who wrote that some of Wagner’s fighters are returning to Ukraine, while the Center of National Resistance of Ukraine underlined that less than 1,000 members of the mercenary group remained in Belarus.

Nevertheless, yesterday Wednesday, the adviser to the Ukrainian president, Mykhailo Podoliak, in a post on the X platform, formerly Twitter, said that there is no Wagner group in Ukraine but only “former fighters of the terrorist group scattered in different areas”.

At the same time, Wagner’s channels for Ukraine on the Telegram platform appear to be frozen with the “news” of the mercenary organization being posted in countries such as Belarus, Niger and Mali.

As the European edition of Politico reports, citing the statements of Ukrainian official Serhii Tserevaty, “the Wagner group is no longer a powerful force. Those who have returned are far from being in the mood to fight. Moreover, it is no longer under the control of the Russian Ministry of Defense.”

It is recalled that last July, as part of the agreement between Prigozhin and the Kremlin, the group’s fighters handed over their weapons to Russia’s regular army, with the option of either following their leader in exile in Belarus, or joining the regular Russian armed forces, or return to their homeland.

But Wagner’s tentacles reach as far as Africa, where a number of countries such as Sudan, the Central African Republic, Libya and Mali still measure its presence. Analysts are weighing Prigozhin’s empire as an opportunity for Russia to exploit its network on the continent and consolidate its presence in it with CNN publishing a series of reports, one of which even concerns an investigation by the American network that reveals possible strikes on of Ukraine in Sudan against paramilitary organizations supported by the mercenary group in the country.