Russian invasion: Putin calls for volunteers in Ukraine

Sixteen days after ordering the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin told his troops to facilitate the sending of volunteer fighters to enable them to reach the combat zones.

Faced with the Ukrainian resistance which reveals the limits of the Russian army, the time has come to call on volunteer fighters for Vladimir Putin. This Friday morning, the Russian president ordered his soldiers to facilitate the sending of these new forces to Ukraine. Moments later, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu clarified that they were Russians “who want, who asked [à partir combattre]», but also of “nationals of the Middle East, Syrians“.

“If you see that people want to go there voluntarily, which is not for money, and help those who live in the Donbass [est de l’Ukraine, ndlr], so you have to go meet them and help them reach the combat zone”, abounded Vladimir Putin. According to him, such a measure is justified because “Western godfathers of the Ukrainian regime are not even hiding” and gather openly “mercenaries from all over the world to send them to Ukraine”. A direct reference to the call made by Volodymyr Zelensky.

As early as February 28, the Ukrainian president had urged foreign citizens to come and fight alongside his armed forces to defend his country. He thus announced the creation of a legion of voluntary foreigners integrated into the Ukrainian army. Last week, President Zelensky was talking about “16,000 foreigners” came to fight after his call to form a “international legion” to defend Ukraine.

Wagner Group and Syrian militiamen

For years, Russia has been accused of using private paramilitaries. The best example: the nebulous Wagner group. This troop of mercenaries, with which the Kremlin denies having the slightest link, has systematically sent its men to areas of interest to Moscow. In Ukraine in 2014, but also in Libya, Syria and the Central African Republic, or even more recently in Mali. On February 28, the British magazine The Times counted more than 400 of these mercenaries deployed in Ukraine. The members of this Russian private box would have been repatriated from Africa, with the mission of “decapitate the Zelensky government”. Financed by the oligarch close to the Kremlin Evgeny Prigogine and directed by a former military intelligence officer, Dmitri Outkine, a man fascinated by Hitler and with collarbones covered in neo-Nazi tattoos, Wagner was created in 2014, on the fringes of the conflict in Crimea and in the Donbas.

According to a September 2020 note from the French Institute of International Relations (Ifri), the Wagner group had 2,500 mercenaries at the end of 2020, while some sources report numbers of up to 5,000 men. It is estimated that 10,000 passed through this private militia.

Already on March 6, the wall street journal alerted to the desire of the Russians to recruit in Syria. He revealed that Putin’s army was trying to enlist mercenaries from this country with experience in urban guerrilla warfare in order to send them to fight in Ukraine. Since 2015, Russia has been on the side of the regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad in the conflict that has put the country on fire and blood.

If it is impossible for the moment to determine the number of these Syrian mercenaries ready to join the Ukrainian front, an American official indicates that some of these fighters are already in Russia. The Kremlin’s call issued this morning should favor their deployment in Ukraine, while the Russian army continues to bombard Ukrainian civilian areas.