The Russian mercenary Wagner Group is set to be proscribed as a terrorist organization by the British government.
Britain’s interior ministry said on Wednesday that a draft order due to laid before parliament will allow Wagner’s assets to be categorised as terrorist property and seized.
It will be illegal to be a member or support the organisation, punishable by up to 14 years in jail.
Britain’s interior minister, Suella Braverman described the Wagner Group as “violent and destructive”, adding it “acted as a military tool of Vladimir Putin’s Russia overseas”.
Across Ukraine, the Middle East and Africa, Wagner has been involved in looting, torture and “barbarous murders”, the statement said, calling it a threat to global security.
The order is expected to come into force on Sept. 13, after which it would be a criminal offence to belong to or promote the group, arrange or address its meetings and carry its logo in public.
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The Wagner mercenary group has operated in Syria, Libya and a number of countries across northern and western Africa. It recruited thousands of convicts from Russian prisons to fight in Ukraine, providing the main assault force for Russia’s 2022-2023 winter offensive there.
In June this year the group launched a brief mutiny in Russia, condemned as treason by President Vladimir Putin, and on Aug. 23 its boss Yevgeny Prigozhin and top lieutenants were killed in a plane crash.
Britain sanctioned Prigozhin in 2020, the Wagner Group as a whole in March 2022, and in July this year sanctioned individuals and businesses with links to the group in the Central African Republic, Mali and Sudan.
(Editor: Oloyede Oworu)
