Fri 09 December 2022:
Russian military company Wagner announced on Thursday that it had opened a cultural center in Serbia’s capital Belgrade.
In a statement, the mercenary group said the “friendship and cooperation center” would focus on public diplomacy as its mission “to strengthen and develop friendly relations between Russia and Serbia with the help of ‘soft power’.”
The group has been described as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s private army. It is led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian businessman and close associate of the president, nicknamed ‘Putin’s chef’.
According to the statement, the center, named Orly, will engage in informational confrontation with Russian liberals who left for Serbia and are working against Moscow.
The center will be headed by Alexander Lisov, a Wagner member who has been banned from entering Kosovo.
Western experts have repeatedly warned of the potential for disruption posed by Russia’s far-right allies in Serbia, on display in street demonstrations in the early days of the Ukraine invasion and underscored by some Serbian leaders’ pronouncements on the war and the government’s refusal to join Western sanctions.
Tensions between Serbia and Kosovo have skyrocketed in the past year, with a recent standoff over mutual recognition of license plates setting off roadblocks and international troop reinforcements near the Serbian-Kosovar border before an EU-mediated compromise was reached last month.
The Wagner Group is a paramilitary organisation disguised as a “private military company” responsible for extra-judicial killings, rape, torture, looting and the attempted assassination of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
The group fought in Ukraine in 2014, where it participated in the annexation of Crimea. It became known globally during the war in Donbas in Ukraine, where it helped separatist forces of the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in the period 2014-2015.
SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
FOLLOW INDEPENDENT PRESS:
TWITTER (CLICK HERE)
https://twitter.com/IpIndependent
FACEBOOK (CLICK HERE)
https://web.facebook.com/ipindependent
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
