Thousands Of Wagner Group Mercenaries Deployed By Russia To Ukraine, UK: 3.000 Estimated Killed, 200 Failed To Carry Out Mission

Wagner Group mercenary illustration. (Source: ssu.gov.ua via VOA)

JAKARTA - A number of British experts before Parliament said nearly 8.000 mercenaries from the Wagner Group were deployed by Russia in the invasion of Ukraine, leaving thousands of them dead.

Providing evidence to the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Christo Grozev, executive director of investigative website Bellingcat, said 3.000 members of the private military company were thought to have died on the battlefield.

He said sources within the group, the largest of the three mercenary groups involved in the conflict, had told them the number fighting alongside Russian troops was 'much more' than expected.

They include 200 personnel sent to Kyiv before the conflict, on a failed mission to 'snoop and kill' political figures. Meanwhile, a large number were deployed with convoys advancing to the capital from Belarus.

He further explained that they had also been present in Bucha, where some of the worst evidence of alleged war crimes had been found.

Grozev said they had been alerted by one of the group's former members, some chose to fight because they enjoyed killing.

"He said that about 10 to 15 percent are sociopaths, people who go there just because they want to kill. They are bloodthirsty, not just adrenaline junkies," he told the committee, reported The National News, April 20.

Meanwhile, Dr. Sean McFate, a senior research fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank and professor at the US University of National Defense said the group's brutality in conflicts such as the Syrian civil war, is part of the selling point as far as Russian President Vladimir Putin is concerned.

"If you look at Bucha and the others, there's the same pattern you see in Syria, where they would interrogate, torture, and behead people," he said.

"One of the reasons I think it has become one of (President) Putin's weapons of choice is, it allows for some plausible deniability between excesses on the ground, failures on the ground and policy," he said.

However, Dr. McFate said so far western countries had not taken the group's threat seriously and had not tracked the movements of its members.

"This has prompted them (Russia) to use this as a ploy for national expansion, national interest," he said.

"We haven't done a pretty good job of tracking them down. We see them as cheap Hollywood criminals, but they really aren't."

Grozev said while imposing more sanctions on the group's head, Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as "Putin's chef", would have little impact. It may be more effective at targeting individual group members who like to vacation abroad with their families.

"Their knowledge is the subject of ridicule about western sanctions, because it is spread through rumors circulating. So stopping all these people from being able to travel internationally, at least to the western world, is probably much, much bigger than imposing one more sanction on Prigozhin," said Grozev.