Nearly 40% of the mercenaries employed by Russia in Ukraine have been killed in action, experts speaking to the British Parliament said.
Christo Grozev, executive director of investigative website Bellingcat, told members of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee that the Wagner Group had lost 3,000 of its 8,000 mercenaries sent to Ukraine, The National reported Tuesday.
The Wagner Group, headed by oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, is a guns-for-hire organization that works to suppress pro-democracy protests, spread disinformation, mine for gold and diamonds, and engage in paramilitary activity, according to the U.S. Treasury.
Reports soon after Russian President Vladimir Putin began his unprovoked attack on Ukraine said the Wagner Group had been hired to take out high-profile Ukrainians, including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Grozev told foreign affairs committee members that sources within the mercenary group said that the numbers of mercenaries killed fighting alongside Russian forces were "much higher" than had been expected.
Besides 200 personnel sent to Kyiv before the war started in a failed mission to "scout out and assassinate" political figures, a "large number" were deployed with convoys that advanced on the capital from Belarus, Grozev said.
The Bellingcat executive told the committee that mercenaries were present in Bucha, where some of the worst evidence of alleged war crimes had been discovered.
Grozev said his website was told by a former group member that some mercenaries chose to fight because they enjoyed killing.
"[The source] said that about 10 to 15% are sociopaths, people who go there just because they want to kill," Grosev told the committee. "They are bloodthirsty, they are not just adrenalin junkies."
Sean McFate, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank and professor at the National Defense University, said the Wagner Group's brutality in the conflicts such as the Syrian civil war was "part of their selling point" to Putin.
"If you look at Bucha and others, there is the same pattern you saw in Syria, where they would interrogate, torture, and behead people," McFate said, The National reported.
"One reason I think it has become one of Putin’s weapon of choice is it allows some plausible deniability between excesses on the ground, failures on the ground, and policy."
McFate added that, to date, Western countries have not taken the threat of the Wagner Group very seriously.
"This has emboldened them [Russia] to use this as a stratagem for national expansion, national interests," McFate said, The National reported.
"We have not done a good enough job in tracking them. We see them as cheap Hollywood villains, but in fact they are not."
Besides losing mercenaries, Russia has lost about one-quarter of its troops, weapons and military equipment originally sent to invade Ukraine less than two months ago, a senior U.S. defense official said Tuesday.
"We believe that [Putin’s] roughly at 75% of his combat power that he had originally when he started," the official told reporters at the Pentagon. "This is across all functions: it's infantry, its artillery, its aviation — both fixed and rotary — it's ballistic missiles, cruise missiles."
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