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By Ellie Cook
Senior Defense Reporter
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Russia's notorious Wagner mercenary group is likely "down-sizing" and restructuring after its short-lived armed mutiny in June, according to a new assessment.
"There is a realistic possibility that the Kremlin no longer funds the group," Britain's defense ministry said in an intelligence update on Sunday.
The Wagner armed rebellion moved from the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don in a march towards Moscow between June 23 and 24, in what experts described as a threat to the Kremlin's stability and President Vladimir Putin's leadership.
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The march was abruptly called off after Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko reportedly brokered a deal to send Wagner leader and Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin and his troops to Belarus.
Wagner fighters have been arriving in Belarus for weeks and estimates on how many mercenary recruits have arrived in the country vary. A spokesperson for Lithuania's defense ministry told Newsweek in late July that it believed the tallies of Wagner members published in Russian and Belarusian media were inflated.
Wagner recruits are being built into Minsk's armed forces to "pass on experience" to Belarusian fighters, Lukashenko said earlier this month in remarks reported by the country's state news agency.
But if the Russian state is no longer financially propping up Wagner, "the second most plausible paymasters are the Belarusian authorities," the British Ministry of Defence said in its update on Sunday.
"However, the sizable force would be a significant and potentially unwelcome drain on modest Belarusian resources," the government department added.
Newsweek has reached out to Belarus' foreign ministry for comment via email.
Wagner's presence in Belarus raised security fears in eastern Europe among several NATO countries, with all eyes looking to the Suwałki Gap. The strategically important strip of land along the borders between Poland and Lithuania, the Suwałki Gap separates Belarus from Kaliningrad, the isolated Russian exclave on the Baltic coast.
Lukashenko said in late July that Wagner soldiers based near the Polish border were "insisting on going westward" into Warsaw's territory, and Poland has beefed up its military presence close to the border with Belarus. Polish Defense Minister, Mariusz Błaszczak, said on Thursday that the armed forces would deploy an extra 10,000 soldiers to the border. Warsaw had already announced it would send additional troops to fortify the border.
Belarus has been conducting military exercises close to the Suwałki Gap in recent days, with Minsk saying the war games pulled on experiences from Russia's war in Ukraine.
Referring to the military drills, the Lithuanian Defense Ministry told Newsweek in a statement on Wednesday that it was "constantly monitoring Russian and Belarusian military exercises," including their locations, scale, weapons, and objectives, "especially when the exercise is about joint Russian-Belarusian military actions against NATO."
But the U.K. ministry also previously suggested that the Kremlin was looking to Putin's personal soldiers as a replacement for Wagner in the wake of the mutiny. Putin has introduced a new measure which could see the Russian National Guard, also known as Rosgvardia, equipped with artillery and attack helicopters, the British ministry said earlier this month. Rosgvardia, led by Putin's former bodyguard, is not formally linked to Russia's military, and reports directly to Putin.
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