They report that 3,000 of the fearsome mercenaries in the service of Vladimir Putin have already died in Ukraine

Not only have Russian troops suffered heavy casualties in these nearly two months of invasion of Ukraine. Of the nearly 8,000 mercenaries of the Wagner Group who were deployed on Ukrainian soil in the service of Vladimir Putin, some 3,000 were killed in combat.

This was reported by Christo Grozev, director of the investigative website Bellingcat, in his appearance before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the United Kingdom House of Commons.

The Bulgarian investigative journalist told British parliamentarians that sources within the Wagner Group acknowledged that the number of mercenaries fighting together with Russian forces is “much higher” than expected.

Among them, about 200 were sent to Kiev before the start of the invasion on a failed mission of “exploration and assassination” of Ukrainian political figures. At the same time, “a large number” were deployed with convoys that advanced over the capital from Belarus, an ally of Russia.

Grozev also commented that a former member of the group revealed to Bellingcat that the mercenaries were also present in Bucha, where Russian troops perpetrated a brutal massacre killing hundreds of civilians.

That source from the Wagner Group, Grozev said, acknowledged that many of the mercenaries decide to go and fight for the pleasure of killing. In that sense, he explained that between 10 and 15 percent are sociopaths: people who agree to go to combat just because they want to kill. “They are bloodthirsty, they are not just addicted to adrenaline,” the investigative journalist told the British Parliament committee.

In his appearance, he said that imposing more sanctions against the group's leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin - known as “Putin's chef” - would have little impact. He therefore indicated that it could be more effective to target each of the individual members of the mercenary group. “Preventing all these people from traveling abroad, at least to the Western world, could be much more important than imposing one more sanction on Prigozhin.”

Authorities believe that Prigozhin is in eastern Ukraine, in the Donbas, to oversee operations, although Putin's wealthy friend is not a military veteran.

“Prigozhin, who has no military experience and is the financier and organizer of the Wagner Group rather than its military commander, is likely to be in Donbas to coordinate the recruitment and financing of the group's operations rather than to command combat operations,” said the Institute for War Studies, a think tank American, quoted by Daily Mail.

Dr. Sean McFate, a member of the Atlantic Council think tank and professor at the United States National Defense University, argued that Western countries had not taken the threat from the Wagner Group very seriously. “This has encouraged them (Russia) to use this as a ploy for national expansion, national interests. We haven't done a good enough job of following it up. We see them as cheap Hollywood villains, but they really aren't.”

McFate analyzed that Putin's troops, with the support of mercenaries, applied in Ukraine “the same pattern seen in Syria, where they questioned, tortured and beheaded people.”

The mercenaries of the Wagner Group, prior to their participation in Ukraine, were deployed years ago in Syria to support Russian forces in their cooperation with the Syrian army of dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the United Kingdom-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, noted that almost certainly there are more than 8,000 mercenaries deployed in Ukraine. He indicated that there were about 18,000 participating in the conflict.

In this vein, a European official spoke on Tuesday who, on condition of anonymity, said that up to 20,000 mercenaries of the Russian private military company and others from Syria and Libya are fighting alongside Putin's forces in Ukraine.

“According to their capabilities, they are infantry. They don't have heavy vehicles or weapons. They are clearly infantry,” he told reporters in Washington. He added: “These guys are mainly used as a mass against Ukrainian resistance.”

According to Ukrainian government officials, one of the missions of Russian mercenaries in Kiev was to assassinate President Volodymir Zelensky and his family.

Private military companies, such as the Wagner Group, have become in recent years a vital tool with which Russia expands its influence in the world while defending its interests. Currently, Russian mercenaries are present in at least 30 countries on four continents, which demonstrates the expansion of this phenomenon that took place in the conflict in Ukraine in 2014 its first trial.

Although mercenary companies are technically illegal under the Russian Constitution, the fact is that they have become a key component of Moscow's “hybrid war” strategy and offer Russian head of state Vladimir Putin a means by which to “carry out his political objectives and advance Russian national security interests around the world”, according to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

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