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Russia has deployed hundreds of mercenaries from an elite, prolific private military contracting firm aligned with the government to eastern Ukraine as a part of its campaign to break the burgeoning stalemate there, Western intelligence assesses.
The convergence on the embattled corner of Ukraine known as the Donbas likely undercuts Russia’s influence in other places globally where the troops, called the Wagner Group, operate, according to the British Ministry of Defense, which released an assessment about the deployment to reporters late Monday.
“They are expected to deploy more than 1,000 mercenaries, including senior leaders of the organization, to undertake combat operations,” British Air Vice-Marshall Mick Smeath said in the statement. “Due to heavy losses and a largely stalled invasion, Russia has likely been forced to reprioritise Wagner personnel for Ukraine at the expense of operations in Africa and Syria.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin had previously appealed to foreign fighters and organizations like Wagner to join his cause in Ukraine.
The British government last week sanctioned the Wagner Group, along with dozens of other influential Russian groups and leaders, in an attempt to target the power centers closest to Putin and his global ambitions. The mercenary network – and the plausible deniability it employs as a private company – has become synonymous with Russia’s more nefarious operations abroad.
The latest deployment has reverberations for Putin’s government beyond the tacit admission of its military struggles in Ukraine.
“Russia’s poor military performance will negatively impact its image abroad, making it less likely for nation-states to seek out Russian training and military-to-military relationships,” private intelligence firm The Soufan Center wrote in an analysis note this week about reports at that time of the Wagner deployment. “Without a reputation for a strong military, Russian military deployments, already associated with a blatant disregard for human rights, will become less attractive.”
Monday’s assessment comes as other Western officials say the surprising potency of Ukrainian defenses has rattled Putin’s battle plan for the former Soviet state, which it invaded without provocation more than a month ago and since then has waged a brutal and bloody campaign that increasingly targets civilian centers.
American military officials revealed last week that Russia appeared to have halted its planned invasion of Kyiv following embarrassing reports that a 40-mile column became stuck on the outskirts of the city without resupply or a plan for moving forward into the capital.
“It could be now that they are reassessing their strategic goals because they aren’t moving in Kyiv anymore,” a senior U.S. defense official told reporters on Monday. “We aren’t entirely sure what is behind this reprioritization.”
Cartoons on Ukraine and Russia
A failure to control the airspace over Ukraine has become among the other greatest blunders of Russian operations so far. The U.S. official added that most airstrikes against targets in Ukraine now come from standoff missiles and other projectiles based on Russian soil or in close ally Belarus – an indication Russian planners fear sending their pilots into airspace covered by Western-supplied anti-aircraft weaponry.
Putin has backed a supposed separatist movement in the Donbas since 2014 when Russia also annexed the strategic Crimean peninsula. Part of Russia’s current operations to seize the strategic port city of Mariupol to the Donbas’ south is as much about blockading Ukraine as it is expanding its foothold in these territories, officials believe.