Photo: Yuri Kochetkov / EPA-EFE

The bodies of 35 Wagner Group mercenaries who were killed in an ambush in Mali in July have been returned to Russia, state-owned news agency TASS reported on Tuesday.

Announcing their return, Alexander Ivanov, the head of the Officers Union for International Security, an international association advocating for global peace and stability, said that the mercenaries would be buried with full military honours.

“In the early hours of 30 September, the Malian Armed Forces and their Russian allies moved to recover the bodies of their dead comrades, and today we have completed that task,” Ivanov said.

The Razgruzka Wagnera Telegram channel, which is known to be close to the mercenary group, confirmed that the bodies had been returned to Russia.

Anastasia Kashevarova, a journalist and former assistant to Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, said that just 35 bodies had been returned to Russia as not all the dead fighters could be recovered.

Scores of Wagner mercenaries were killed in fighting around the town of Tinzaouaten on Mali’s border with Algeria in July. Tuareg rebels in northern Mali claimed responsibility for killing the troops who had been under contract to the Malian government, Reuters reported at the time.

While no official death toll has been given by the Russian authorities, one source told BBC News Russian that 82 Wagner mercenaries had died in the ambush in total, which, according to The Wall Street Journal, amounted to one of the heaviest losses of life suffered by Russian mercenaries in Africa since they were first deployed there in 2017.