Russian private military contractor Wagner Group has up to 1,200 people deployed in Libya, strengthening the forces of eastern-based military leader Khalifa Haftar, according to a confidential United Nations report seen by Reuters on Wednesday.
The 57-page report by independent sanctions monitors, submitted to the U.N. Security Council Libya sanctions committee, said the Russian contractor deployed forces in specialized military tasks, including sniper teams.
The sanctions monitors said that while they could not independently verify the scale of the deployment to Libya by Wagner Group, “based on open source reporting and the limited sightings assesses that the maximum number of individual private military operatives deployed to be no more than 800 to 1,200.”