South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Kremlin deploying more mercenaries to Ukraine
Private force with ties to Putin to take on an enhanced role
WASHINGTON — Russian mercenaries with combat experience in Syria and Libya are gearing up to assume an increasingly active role in a phase of the war in Ukraine that Moscow now says is its top priority: fighting in the country’s east.
The number of mercenaries deployed to Ukraine from the Wagner Group, a private military force with ties to President Vladimir Putin of Russia, is expected to more than triple to at least
1,000 fighters from about
300 a month ago, just before the invasion, a U.S. official said Friday.
The official added that the mercenaries would focus on defeating Ukrainian forces in the country’s Donbas region, where Russiabacked separatists have been fighting a war since
2014, and elsewhere in eastern Ukraine.
Dispatching trusted Russian mercenaries to help with a pivotal part of the invasion underscores the
Kremlin’s efforts to regroup and refocus its flagging military campaign that so far has failed to achieve Putin’s initial goals, U.S. and other Western officials said.
The Russian military signaled last week that it might be lowering its war ambitions and focusing on the Donbas, although military analysts said it remained to be seen whether the move constituted a meaningful shift or was a maneuver to distract attention before another offensive.
Wagner is the best-known of an array of Russian mercenary groups, which over the years have become more formalized, acting more like Western military contractors.
“The Wagner Group is a private military contractor for Russia,” John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said last week. “We know that they have interest in increasing their footprint in Ukraine.”
Wagner’s fighters have garnered military experience in Middle East conflicts and serve as security advisers to various governments, including in the Central African Republic, Sudan and, most recently, Mali. Although they are loosely linked to the Russian military, they operate at a distance, which has allowed the Kremlin to try to deflect responsibility whenever the fighters’ behavior comes under scrutiny.
Underscoring how seriously Wagner considers its role in the conflict in Ukraine, senior Wagner leaders are expected to deploy to the separatist enclaves of Donetsk and Luhansk to coordinate efforts on behalf of Russia, the U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential operational assessments.
Wagner is relocating not only some of its mercenaries in Libya and Syria to Ukraine, but also artillery, air defenses and radar that the group was using in Libya, the official said. The Russian military is supporting these transfers by providing military cargo aircraft to relocate personnel and equipment.
While Wagner’s numbers are tiny compared with the more than 150,000 troops that Putin amassed on Ukraine’s borders and eventually sent into the country, their presence is an indication that Putin is taking a page from his playbook
in 2014, when the Kremlin deployed Russian mercenaries, mostly veterans of the Russian military, to augment the forces of rebel fighters in eastern Ukraine.
Earlier this year, Western intelligence services detected the first small groups of Wagner mercenaries leaving Libya and Syria and arriving in Russian-controlled Crimea. From there, they filtered into the rebel territories.
But their initial performance on the battlefield was decidedly inauspicious, as they faced stiffer-than-expected resistance from Ukrainian soldiers. As many
as 200 Russian mercenaries had been killed as of late February, the U.S. official said.
A Ukrainian military official said just before the invasion began that the mercenaries were primarily brought in to fill out the ranks of the separatist forces, to make it seem as if local fighters were leading the charge.
Now the mercenaries are taking on a more direct combat and leadership role in eastern Ukraine, the U.S. official said.
In 2021, a United Nations report found that mercenaries from Wagner based in the
Central African Republic had killed civilians, looted homes and fatally shot worshippers at a mosque.
Several years earlier, Wagner fighters in Syria worked with pro-government Syrian forces to launch a major artillery barrage against U.S. commandos at a desert redoubt, apparently in an attempt to seize oil and gas fields the Americans were protecting. In response, the Americans called in airstrikes that resulted in 200 to 300 deaths.
In both cases, the Russian government denied involvement.