On Monday, two members of the Italian government, Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani and Defense Minister Guido Crosetto, commented on the recent large increase in the arrival of migrants by sea from North Africa, arguing that Russian mercenaries from the Wagner group may be behind it.
Earlier Tajani, on a visit to Israel, said he was concerned by the fact that “many migrants arrive from areas controlled by the Wagner group” and added that he feared that there could be “an attempt to push migrants towards Italy”. Then Crosetto said in a note sent to the news agency that «it seems to me that by now we can say that the exponential increase in the migratory phenomenon that departs from the African coasts is also, to a not indifferent extent, part of a clear hybrid war strategy that the Wagner division, mercenaries in the pay of Russia, is implementing, using its significant weight in some African countries”.
In the evening, the answer came from Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian businessman allied with President Vladimir Putin and founder of the Wagner group. On the group’s Telegram channel, he published an audio message in which he rejected the Italian government’s accusations, saying that “we are not aware of what is happening with the migration crisis, we do not deal with it, we have a bunch of other problems to deal with », and he insulted the minister Crosetto defining him as follows:
“He’s just an asshole and a jackass.”
The Wagner Group is a private company in the service of the Russian government, made up of ex-military, ex-policemen and ex-security agents, which is currently fighting on various fronts of the war in Ukraine, in particular in the siege of Bakhmut. In recent years, the mercenaries of the Wagner group have fought several wars where Russia had an interest in intervening, including several African and Middle Eastern countries such as Libya, Mali, the Central African Republic and Syria.
In the comments by Tajani and Crosetto there is no reference to a specific African country, nor in Prigozhin’s answer, but it is highly probable that they were talking about Libya, the country from which most of the migrants who try to arrive clandestinely leave Italy by sea, as well as the African country where the Wagner group has been most active for years.
The group’s mercenaries had begun operating in Libya after the end of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime and the start of the civil war, and had joined the militias of Marshal Khalifa Haftar in the war against the government in Tripoli, supported by Western countries. In the last two years, Haftar’s power has significantly reduced, but the political situation in Libya is still very unstable (there are two competing governments, one in Tripoli and one in Tobruk) and many mercenaries from the Wagner group are still present in the country, although there is no exact estimate of their number.
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