London: The United Kingdom on Friday officially declared the Russian mercenary, Wagner Group, which rallied at Moscow before drawing back, as a terrorist organisation. The move to proscribe Wagner Group as a terrorist group was announced last week, which will make it illegal to be a member or to support it.
A draft order was laid before UK Parliament to make way for Wagner Group’s assets to be categorised as terrorist property and seized, the interior ministry said in a statement.
As this announcement was made public, Interior minister Suella Braverman described Wagner as “violent and destructive”. It had acted as “a military tool of Vladimir Putin’s Russia overseas,” she said. “They are terrorists, plain and simple – and this proscription order makes that clear in UK law,” Braverman said.
The official statement also mentioned that the Wagner group is infamous for looting and “barbarous murders” across Ukraine, the Middle East and Africa.
Back in June, the Wagner mercenaries declared rebellion and successfully captured the Army headquarters in Rostov-on-Don before advancing towards Moscow to destabilize the military and overthrow the Russian government.
The only opposition they faced came from some civilians, but many others cheered them on, viewing Prigozhin as a challenger of a “corrupt” government in his “march of justice”. But the rebellion lasted only a few hours as the Wagner Group retracted, “to avoid a bloodbath.”
A few months later, the Russian media reported that mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was aboard the plane that crashed north of Moscow. The crash between Moscow and St. Petersburg happened two months after Prigozhin led his fighters in a brief mutiny against Russia’s military leadership.