Russian deputy: Putin is preparing an attack on Poland with Wagner fighters from Belarus

 Russian MP Andrei Kartapolov suggested that there were Russian preparations to launch an attack on Poland by a group of fighters from the Wagner Special Military Group, amid Polish-Ukrainian confirmations of the arrival of fighters from that group in Belarus.

And the American magazine “Newsweek” quoted today, Sunday, Kartapolov - who previously held the position of Deputy Minister of Defense of Russia before becoming a deputy in Parliament (Duma) - as saying, “I believe that President Vladimir Putin expelled the Wagner Group to Belarus to prepare for an attack on Poland.”, noting that the former Russian military leader made this opinion during his appearance on Russian state television with the journalist Vladimir Solovyov.

"It is clear that the private military company Wagner went to Belarus to train the Belarusian armed forces, but not only for this. There is such a thing as the Suwalki corridor, and you know very well what it is. If anything happens, we need this corridor," Kartapolov said.

He added, "The Wagner Group will be ready to take over the land within hours, and the Ministry of Defense will determine what they gave and what they took, and I am not talking about that, but about the fact that the strike force is ready to seize this small corridor within hours."

Kartapolov's remarks were met with a response from Solovyov, who noted that the Wagner Group had handed over equipment to the Russian authorities before leaving the country.

The aforementioned corridor is a sparsely populated strip of land that runs along Poland's northeastern border, a small but strategically important strip of Polish territory between Russia and the enclave of Kaliningrad that has long been a sticking point for Russia.

The corridor's geopolitical importance raises concerns about a Russian attack, which could also attract a NATO response because of the alliance's Article 5, which states that an attack on a NATO country will be treated as an attack against all members of the alliance.

Kartapolov's statements come after Poland moved its forces last week to its eastern borders due to fears of Wagner, and Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak tweeted a week ago, saying, "More than a thousand soldiers and nearly 200 units of equipment from the 12th and 17th Mechanized Brigade began moving to the east of the country as part of From the "Budlasi security" operation, and this is evidence of our readiness to respond to attempts to destabilize the borders of our country.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian and Polish officials said on Saturday that fighters from the Wagner Group had arrived in Belarus from Russia, a day after Minsk announced that the mercenary group was training its soldiers in a camp southeast of the capital.

"Wagner is in Belarus, and the movements of 'separate groups' from Russia have been monitored in Belarus," Andriy Demchenko, a spokesman for Ukraine's border agency, said in a statement posted on the Telegram app.

Two sources close to the fighters told Reuters that some Wagner fighters have been in Belarus since last Tuesday.

On Friday, the Belarusian Ministry of Defense published a video showing what it said were Wagner fighters training Belarusian soldiers in a military area near the town of Osipovichi, about 90 km southeast of the capital, Minsk.

Warsaw also has confirmations of the presence of Wagner fighters in Belarus, said Stanislav Zarin, deputy minister for the coordinator of special services in Poland, adding on Twitter, "There may be several hundred of them at the moment."

It is noteworthy that Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group, has not appeared in public since he left the city of Rostov in southern Russia late on June 24, despite the movement of a private plane linked to him between Belarus, Moscow, and St. Petersburg.