Wagner Forces Would Be 'Crushed' if They Invaded Poland, Expert Says

Nearly two months after Yevgeney Prigozhin's Wagner Group made an abortive attempt to march on Moscow, approximately 4000 Wagner fighters have taken up residence on the territory of Belarus. But while Belarusian president Alexander Lukahsenko has hinted that the mercenaries might be interested in conducting incursions into Poland, the Wagner fighters in his country currently lack the kinds of numbers, equipment, and logistical capacity necessary for launching a credible attack.

"The Wagner contingent in Belarus would be crushed by Polish forces if they actually tried to cross the border," Ben Hodges, the Former Commanding General of U.S. Army forces in Europe, told Newsweek.

His assessment is largely shared by Western military analysts.

"The Russian Ministry of Defense demanded that the Wagner Group turn over all its heavy weaponry, and everything we've observed indicates that they have," George Barros of the Institute for the Study of War told Newsweek.

"There's no evidence that they have field artillery, or infantry fighting vehicles, or main battle tanks, or any of the other equipment they would need in order to mount a serious offensive against the military of a neighboring nation state," he explained.

Although many of the individual Wagner personnel camping out in Belarus may have participated in the fight for Bakhmut or the seizure of Severodonetsk, both of which saw Russian forces push forward on the battlefield in Ukraine after the towns in question had largely been obliterated by artillery fire, any successes Wagner fighters previously enjoyed relied in large part on logistical support from the regular Russian military.

While its brand remains potent, a Wagner Group devoid of reliable access to equipment, ammunition, air support, and other supplies is not the same fighting force that spearheaded Russian offensive efforts in the Donbas this past winter.

"The Russian army failed to take Kyiv with 30,000 troops in 2022," Barros explained. "Four thousand largely isolated Wagner personnel do not pose a serious threat to anyone in the immediate neighborhood of Belarus, whether that be to Poland, Lithuania, or Ukraine."

However, even if the Wagner fighters in Belarus do not offer the Kremlin any real potential for further offensive actions, their presence there is not superfluous. They could be put to work training the largely inexperienced Belarusian armed forces, or utilized by Lukashenko as a kind of Praetorian guard in the event that a domestic protest movement similar to the one that sprung up in August 2020 emerges again.

Putin could also use them to put pressure on the Lukashenko regime in Minsk, threatening to usurp what remains of Belarusian sovereignty. And it is possible that, even if they are not capable of actually taking and holding foreign territory, Wagner forces could be used to test just how far Russian-aligned forces can push without triggering NATO's Article V collective defense clause.

"If the Wagner forces do ever find themselves in any sort of engagement with NATO troops, Russia would try to disassociate themselves from whatever happened," Hodges noted.

If such a scenario were to play out, it would not be the first time that Belarus was used as the staging ground for hybrid operations against NATO countries. For nearly two years, the regime in Minsk has been attracting aspiring Middle Eastern migrants to Belarus, transporting them to the country's western border, ordering them forward into European territory, and daring Polish and Lithuanian border guards to respond with force.

"We don't know what Putin and the Wagner group agreed upon on June 29 when they met," Warsaw-based Belarusian political analyst Dmitry Bolkunets told Newsweek, referencing a lengthy conversation reportedly held between the mercenary leader and the Russian president just five days after the former's aborted mutiny. "It's possible that Prigozhin is ready to work off his guilt by doing something for Putin."

Authorities in Warsaw and Vilnius are responding to the Wagner presence with vigilance and caution. On August 10, Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak announced that up to 10,000 of his country's troops would be redeployed closer to the Belarusian border. However, an overreaction to the perceived threat could also work to Moscow's advantage.

"Any distraction that triggers alarmism in the West regarding the situation along NATO's border with Belarus helps Russia by deterring support for Ukraine," Kateryna Stepanenko, an analyst of the Russian information space with the Institute for the Study of War, told Newsweek.

Dating back to a time before the Russian invasion, Western aid for Kyiv has followed a predictable cycle. Nearly every time the government of president Volodymyr Zelensky has requested a new form of weaponry—from Javelin anti-tank missiles to HIMARS multiple launch rocket systems to Western-made main battle tanks to F-16 aircraft—the resulting debate in Western capitals about whether this next step might finally represent an escalation violating some unstated Kremlin "red line" has delayed the delivery of critical armaments past the date at which Ukrainian forces could have put them to the best possible use.

That debate has now shifted to the provision of ATACMS, tactical ballistic missiles that would give Ukraine a weapon with the range necessary to strike targets significantly deeper inside Russian-occupied Crimea. Under the circumstances, the Kremlin's incentive to attempt to induce yet another delay is apparent.

"We could provide Ukraine with long-range strike capabilities that would make the Russian presence in Crimea untenable," Hodges explained. "If the Russian Black Sea fleet were no longer based in Sevastopol, it would no longer have the ability to disrupt grain shipments to Ukraine, to lay mines in the Western Black sea, to board cargo ships."

"And yet we don't provide Ukraine with everything it needs to win," he added, "in large part because we've allowed Kremlin narratives to distract us from reaching a consensus on the goal that a swift, decisive Ukrainian victory is in our strategic interests."

While it remains to be seen whether the Wagner forces in Belarus will ever actually be ordered to attempt to take the kinds of actions that might provoke a more kinetic response from Western border guards or military personnel, ISW information sphere expert Stepanenko cautioned that such a development, even if it were to occur, should be seen as a Russian attempt to influence Western public opinion rather than as a serious sign that Western aid to Ukraine has become the catalyst for a long-feared escalation in the conflict.

"Any time and energy that we spend discussing Wagner in Belarus is time and energy that can't be spent focusing on the real war in Ukraine and taking the steps that are necessary to ensure that Kyiv receives everything it needs in order to win," Stepanenko said. "And the Russians understand this."

Neither the Russian nor the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to Newsweek's requests for comment by the time of publication.