“You turned to a private military company from Russia,” Lavrov said in New York. In France and other western countries, reports of the possible deployment of troops from the Russian mercenary company Wagner in Mali had recently aroused great concern.
There were increasing voices asking, in such a case, whether one should withdraw from Mali with one’s troops. According to the Interfax agency, Lavrov said on Saturday at a press conference on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly: “As I understand it, in connection with the fact that France wants to significantly reduce its military contingent that was there and (… ) Should fight terrorists. ” Lavrov did not mention the name Wagner. He merely emphasized that Moscow had nothing to do with Mali’s contact with the private military company.
The Malian government announced about a week ago that the alleged plans to hire the Russian mercenary company Wagner were just rumors. According to information from the capital Bamako, the leadership that came to power through a coup is primarily concerned with personal protection.
The former colonial power France is present in Mali with a particularly large number of soldiers. It works to stabilize the Sahel region. The armed forces are also involved in two international missions in Mali – the EU training mission EUTM and the UN mission MINUSMA. EUTM says it has trained 15,000 Malian soldiers. The success is considered to be moderate, in some cases there is already a lack of bookkeeping in Mali, where soldiers, pay and weapons have remained.
The defense ministers of 13 European countries had only rejected a possible deployment of the Russian mercenary force Wagner in Mali as “unacceptable” on Friday. “We will not accept the Wagner group appearing in the Malian theater,” said Swedish Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist at a meeting of the European Intervention Initiative (EI2) in Stockholm on Friday. Austria is not part of the initiative.
