KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysians have been spotted as mercenaries operating in the occupied Donetsk region, says the Ukraine National Resistance Centre.

       The Centre - which is run by the Ukraine government's Special Operations Forces - said that these mercenaries were accompanied by a translator and a former member of the Wagner Group at a training ground in the area.

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       It added that Malaysians were not the only nationality seen operating in the area, as Cubans, Nepalese, Belarusians, Serbs and representatives of other countries have also been repeatedly seen alongside Russian armed forces

       The Centre then said that anyone fighting along Russians against Ukraine is a military target and called on the local population to continue reporting information about the enemy

       The Wagner Group officially known as PMC Wagner is a Russian state-funded private military company (PMC) controlled until 2023 by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former close ally of Russia's president Vladimir Putin.

       Wagner has operated in Syria and a number of countries in northern and western Africa.

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       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.