The Seimas (unicameral parliament) of Lithuania has univocally adopted a resolution to designate Evgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group as a terrorist organization.
On Tuesday, 117 legislators voted in favor of the designation. No one abstained from voting, and no one voted against the proposed resolution, which states that the private mercenary company (PMC) poses a threat to state and public security.
The document acknowledges that, since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the PMC and its recruits have been committing “systematic and grave crimes of aggression,” including “killing and torture of Ukrainian civilians, as well as air strikes on residential buildings and other civilian objects, which amounts to terrorism.”
The resolution identifies Prigozhin as a person “close to the Russian President Vladimir Putin,” and speaks of the PMC as a “shadow instrument” of Putin’s regime that assisted Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and its military intervention in eastern Ukraine in 2015. The document also notes Wagner Group’s complicity in war crimes in Mali, Sudan, and the Central African Republic.
As the first European country to pass a resolution about Wagner Group and its terrorist designation, Lithuania calls on other EU countries to follow its example.
