The British government intends to designate the Russian mercenary Wagner Group as a terrorist group, according to the interior ministry on Wednesday.
Wagner’s assets would be classified as terrorist property and seized under a draft order that will be presented to parliament, the ministry said in a statement.
Being a member or supporting the organization will be unlawful, punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
Suella Braverman, Britain’s interior secretary, condemned the Wagner Group as “violent and destructive,” adding that it “acted as a military tool of Vladimir Putin’s Russia overseas.”
Wagner has been implicated in looting, torturing, and “barbarous murders” across Ukraine, the Middle East, and Africa, according to the statement, posing a threat to world security.
“They are terrorists, plain and simple – and this proscription order makes that clear in UK law,” she said.
The order is expected to come into force on Sept. 13, after which it would be a criminal offence to belong to or promote the group, arrange or address its meetings and carry its logo in public.
The Wagner mercenary group has operated in Syria, Libya and a number of countries across northern and western Africa. It recruited thousands of convicts from Russian prisons to fight in Ukraine, providing the main assault force for Russia’s 2022-2023 winter offensive there.
In June of this year, the organization staged a brief insurrection in Russia, which President Vladimir Putin branded as treason, and on August 23, its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and top lieutenants were murdered in an aircraft crash.
Britain sanctioned Prigozhin in 2020, the Wagner Group as a whole in March 2022, and individuals and businesses with links to the group in the Central African Republic, Mali, and Sudan in July this year.
In July, lawmakers on parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee called for more targeted penalties against what they called a “web of entities” beneath the Wagner Group.
