A US Army veteran Craig Lang, who is wanted for double homicide in Florida and who now fights side by side with Ukrainian neo-Nazis, is but one of a large number of shady types who flocked to Kiev’s banners for money, thrills and a chance to murder people with impunity.
Aside from welcoming unsavory foreign characters such as Lang, the regime in Kiev has also enlisted the services of many domestic criminals, having “opened up their own prisons right in the very beginning of the conflict,” international relations and security analyst Mark Sleboda points out.
“Sure there's lots of people with prior and active criminal records fighting for the regime, not just from the US, but from other countries,” Sleboda told Sputnik.
According to him, the likes of Lang, who has been fighting in Donbass as part of Ukrainian neo-Nazi units since 2015, essentially highlight the nature of the Kiev regime.
While thousands of foreign mercenaries arrived in Ukrainian conflict zone since February 2022 to fight on the side of the Kiev, many of them have since met an inglorious end, either dying on the battlefield or perishing during precision strikes that Russian forces regularly conduct against the mercenary staging areas.
Since the launch of the Russian military operation on February 24, 2022, some 4,990 foreign mercenaries employed by Kiev have been eliminated and another 4,910 fled the country, according to the data provided by the Russian Ministry of Defense.
For more in-depth analisys on the issue check out our The Final Countdown broadcast.