A band of neo-Nazi Russian mercenaries led by a commander who boasted of cutting the ears off enemy corpses has been deployed in eastern Ukraine before an expected assault.
Fighters for Rusich, a force affiliated with the Kremlin-backed Wagner Group, were photographed near the Russian-Ukrainian border on Wednesday, crossing into the Kharkiv region near the village of Pletenivka in Z-marked vehicles.
The village is roughly 40 miles from Kharkiv, the second city, where Ukrainian defence officials expect a renewed assault by Russian forces in the coming days.
Rusich, founded in St Petersburg in 2014 by Aleksei Milchakov and Yan Petrovsky, is thought to consist of a few hundred mercenaries whose insignia is the valknut, an old Norse symbol appropriated by white supremacists.
Rusich mercenaries have
