CAIRO -- The Pentagon accused Moscow on Tuesday of dispatching fighter jets to Libya to bolster Kremlin-linked mercenaries helping an eastern warlord, marking an escalation in Russia's role in the Middle East's largest proxy war.
In a statement, the U.S. Africa Command said the jets were flown from an air base in Russia first to Syria, where they were "repainted to camouflage their Russian origin." They were then sent to eastern Libya, arriving last week at a base controlled by commander Khalifa Hifter, who launched an offensive on the capital, Tripoli, last year, according to Libyan officials, diplomats and analysts.
The aircraft, the statement said, are "likely to provide close air support and offensive fires" for Russian mercenaries working for the Wagner Group, a shadowy private army that experts have linked to Yevgeniy Prigozhin, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Since September, hundreds of Russian mercenaries have fought on Tripoli's front lines alongside Hifter's forces, who seek to topple the capital's United Nations-backed government. But virtually all of the mercenaries left Tripoli over the weekend after Hifter's forces suffered a series of stunning military reversals in western Libya, prompting the dispatch of the fighter jets.
"Russia is clearly trying to tip the scales in its favor in Libya," said U.S. Army Gen. Stephen Townsend, commander of U.S. Africa Command, in the statement. "Just like I saw them doing in Syria, they are expanding their military footprint in Africa using government-supported mercenary groups like Wagner."
"For too long, Russia has denied the full extent of its involvement in the ongoing Libyan conflict. Well, there is no denying it now. We watched as Russia flew fourth generation jet fighters to Libya -- every step of the way," Townsend said.
Andrei Krasov, deputy head of the defense committee of the lower house of Russia's parliament, denied that Russia has deployed military planes to Libya.
"Another U.S.-style horror story. That's a fake and misinformation presented in the spirit of the previous U.S. administration," Krasov told the Interfax news agency.
Russia has employed state-sponsored Wagner in Libya to conceal its direct role and to afford Moscow plausible deniability of its malign actions, U.S. Africa Command said.
"The world heard Mr. Hifter declare he was about to unleash a new air campaign. That will be Russian mercenary pilots flying Russian-supplied aircraft to bomb Libyans," Townsend said.
The North African oil producing nation is in the grips of its worst bloodshed since its late dictator Moammar Gadhafi was toppled and later killed during the 2011 Arab Spring revolts and NATO intervention. The war is being fueled by regional and European powers, especially Turkey, Russia, the United Arab Emirates, France and Egypt, which have backed the warring sides for a variety of interests, including lucrative oil and gas contracts, territory, ideological and geostrategic goals.
On Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also called for an immediate ceasefire in Libya and said attempts to resolve the Libyan crisis by force had no future, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry. Lavrov, speaking by phone to the speaker of the Libyan House of Representatives, Aguila Saleh, called for negotiations between Libyan parties to the conflict in order to end the hostilities.
Information for this article was contributed by Sudarsan Raghavan and Robyn Dixon of The Washington Post; and by Samy Magdy and Vladimir Isachenkov of The Associated Press.
A Section on 05/27/2020