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War in Ukraine has decimated the ranks of the nearly 8,000 mercenaries from the Wagner Group deployed by Russia to the conflict in Ukraine, according to experts speaking in the UK parliament.
Giving evidence to the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Christo Grozev, executive director of the Bellingcat investigative website, said 3,000 members of the private military company were thought to have been killed on the battlefield.
He said sources within the group — the largest of three mercenary groups involved in the conflict — had told them that the numbers fighting alongside Russian forces had been “much higher” than had been expected.
They included 200 personnel sent to Kyiv before the conflict in a failed mission to “scout out and assassinate” political figures, while a “large number” were deployed with convoys which advanced on the capital from Belarus.
He said they had also been present in Bucha, where some of the worst evidence of alleged war crimes had been discovered.
Mr Grozev said they had been told by one former group member that some chose to fight because they enjoyed killing.
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A sign that reads 'Children' is fixed on to a car windscreen riddled with bulletholes in Irpin, Ukraine. AFP -
A woman weeps next to her husband's coffin at a cemetery in Irpin. AFP -
Residents walk amid debris of a charred Russian tank next to destroyed houses in the village of Zalissya. AFP -
Volunteers distribute food to residents in Zalissya. AFP -
A man walks past a damaged apartment building in the southern port city of Mariupol. Reuters -
Tamara, 71, cries in front of a destroyed apartment building in Mariupol. Reuters -
Local residents push a cart with a child past destroyed buildings in Mariupol. Reuters -
A record player sits among debris inside an apartment in Mariupol. Reuters -
Residents carry belongings past a destroyed building in Mariupol. Reuters -
Security guards help an injured man following a Russian bombing of a factory in Kramatorsk. AP -
A man receives first aid treatment. AP -
Soldiers collect explosives after recent battles in the village of Moshchun, close to Kyiv. AP -
The Komodor logistics park lies in ruins after being bombed and burnt during the Russian invasion near Makarov. Getty Images -
A room in a kindergarten stands windowless in Makarov. Getty Images -
A vehicle draped with a Ukrainian flag passes over a war-damaged bridge in Makarov. Getty Images -
A man sits in a basement that was used as a bomb shelter in the village of Kukhari. EPA -
Local residents clean the area around a destroyed farm in Kukhari. EPA -
Nadia looks at her husband's coffin at a cemetery in Bucha. He was killed during the war. AFP -
Mangled buildings in Irpin point to the ravages of the ongoing war. Getty Images -
A burnt apartment tower in Irpin. Getty Images -
Family members grieve during the funeral of Ruslan Nechyporenko, 47, in Bucha. Getty Images -
An abandoned Russian military position in Borodyanka town near Kyiv. EPA -
Heavily pregnant Dr Marta Kopan, who fled Kyiv with her husband Dr Maxim Motsya and their three-year-old son Makar, narrates their ordeal at a relative's place in Lviv. AP -
A Ukrainian officer searches for unexploded explosives as he passes by an Antonov An-225, the world's biggest cargo aircraft, destroyed during the war on the outskirts of Kyiv. AP -
A woman stands amid the destruction caused when a civilian building was hit by a Russian missile in Lviv, western Ukraine. Getty Images -
Ukrainian soldiers on an armoured personnel carrier, near the front line with Russian troops, in Izyum district, Kharkiv region, north-eastern Ukraine. AFP -
Ukrainian refugees arrive at the Siret border crossing between Romania and Ukraine. AFP -
Ukranian soldiers in a trench look out across the front line near Kharkiv. AFP -
Cars destroyed in Russian attacks, in Irpin, near Kyiv. The scene of fierce fighting, the town was occupied by Russian forces. Reuters -
Damaged and destroyed vehicles at Illich Iron and Steel Works Metallurgical Plant, in an area controlled by Russian-backed separatists in besieged south-eastern city Mariupol. AP -
Russian military vehicles in an area controlled by Moscow-backed separatists near Mariupol. AP -
An elderly woman waits do be evacuated from a hospice in Chasiv Yar city, in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine. At least 35 residents have been helped to flee from the region that has been under attack for weeks. AP -
A Ukrainian Interior Ministry serviceman collects unexploded shells, grenades and mines, following fierce fighting in Hostomel. AP
“He said that about 10 to 15 per cent are sociopaths, people who go there just because they want to kill. They are bloodthirsty, they are not just adrenalin junkies,” he told the committee.
Dr Sean McFate, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank and professor at the US National Defence University, said the group’s brutality in the conflicts such as the Syrian civil war was “part of their selling point” as far as Russian President Vladimir Putin was concerned.
“If you look at Bucha and others, there is the same pattern you saw in Syria, where they would interrogate, torture and behead people,” he said.
“One reason I think it has become one of Putin’s weapons of choice is it allows some plausible deniability between excesses on the ground, failures on the ground, and policy.”
However, Dr McFate said that to date western countries had not taken the threat of the group very seriously, and had not tracked the movements of its members.
“This has emboldened them [Russia] to use this as a stratagem for national expansion, national interests,” he said.
“We have not done a good enough job in tracking them. We see them as cheap Hollywood villains, but in fact they are not.”
Mr Grozev said that 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 targeting individual group members who like to holiday abroad with their families.
“The knowledge that they do is a cause of ridicule about western sanctions because this spreads through the rumour mill,” he said.
“So stopping all of these people being able to travel internationally, at least to the western world, might be much, much bigger than slapping one more sanction on Prigozhin.”
