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What is Wagner group?
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The private army had always denied involvement in conflicts in Africa and the Middle East.
According to Wagner’s chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, 62, the group has around 25,000 troops.
Prigozhin last year admitted he had founded the group, recruiting soldiers from Russian prisons in exchange for amnesty.
However, the UK Ministry of Defence said in January estimated that the group has at least 50,000 fighters in Ukraine.
It said the organisation started recruiting in large numbers in 2022 because Russia had trouble finding people for the regular army.
A BBC investigation into the Wagner Group highlighted the believed involvement of a former Russian army officer, Dmitri Utkin. A veteran of Russia’s wars in Chechnya, he is thought to have been Wagner’s first field commander and to have named the group after his former radio call sign.
Prigozhin, its current head, is a rich businessman nicknamed “Putin’s chef” because he provided catering for the Kremlin.
Although mercenary forces are illegal in Russia, the Wagner Group registered as a company in 2022 and opened a new headquarters in St Petersburg.
“It is openly recruiting in Russian cities, on billboards, and is being named in Russian media as a patriotic organisation,” says Dr Samuel Ramani, of the Royal United Services Institute think tank.
Western countries and UN experts have accused Wagner mercenaries of human rights abuses throughout Africa, including in Central African Republic, Libya, and Mali.
In eastern Ukraine, the mercenary unit has been spearheading Russia’s costly battles. It had been at the forefront of the months-long assault for Bakhmut, capturing the site for Russia, but at huge losses.
The brutal fight also created a rift between the group and the regular military.
Prigozhin railed for months against the regular army’s top brass, accusing generals of incompetence and of withholding ammunition from his fighters. This month, he defied orders to sign a contract placing his troops under Defence Ministry command.
He launched the apparent mutiny on Friday after alleging that the military had killed many of his fighters in an air strike. The Defence Ministry denied it.
Prigozhin also said Russia’s justification for their war in Ukraine was a lie and merely an excuse for Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu to promote himself.

EU welcomes Meta plans for tough content rules
AFP, San Francisco
The EU on Friday cautiously welcomed efforts made by Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, to prepare for new European rules on content moderation that kick in on August 25.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg “was very involved and knew exactly where we stand,” EU commissioner Thierry Breton told reporters after talks at the social media giant’s California headquarters.
“Now we expect the promising commitments I heard today to translate into results. I will be particularly vigilant on progress regarding disinformation and child protection,” he said.
Breton said that more than 1,000 people were working on implementation at Meta of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and that the company had agreed to carry out a “stress test” in July to ensure it was prepared for the new rules.
The test would take place at Meta’s EU headquarters in Dublin, with video app TikTok also signed up to carry out the procedure with EU officials.
The EU commissioner made a two-day visit to San Francisco eight weeks before the DSA comes into full force for the world’s biggest platforms, including Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, as well as TikTok and Twitter.
The DSA is one of the most ambitious legislations on controlling online content since the advent of social media, putting major obligations on how platforms deal with the free flow of speech.
To meet the new rules, Twitter, Meta, TikTok and other platforms will have to invest heavily on building compliance teams at a time when big tech companies have been cutting staff, including their content moderation workforce.
In a tweet following the talks, Meta’s head of public policy Nick Clegg welcomed a “constructive discussion” with the EU.
Meta, with platforms that reach billions of users worldwide, continues to come under fire for its failings in taking down toxic content.
A report earlier this month in the Wall Street Journal found that Instagram is the main platform used by pedophile networks to promote and sell content showing child sexual abuse
The meeting with Zuckerberg followed a similar meeting with Elon Musk at Twitter headquarters, where the commissioner also welcomed the efforts made ahead of the DSA’s entry into force.
But Breton told Musk and his new CEO Linda Yaccarino that the company will have to have adequate resources in place to meet the new rules, or risk being in infraction with EU authorities.
Major violations of DSA rules could see tech giants slapped with fines as high as six percent of annual turnover and, if violations persist, be banned outright from the EU as a last resort measure.