Wagner’s mercenary group completes the handover of military hardware.

The Wagner mercenary group is completing the handover of its military hardware and weapons to the regular armed forces, according to Russia’s Ministry of Defence, two weeks after a short-lived mutiny that saw its columns advance on Moscow.

The ministry announced on Wednesday that it had received more than 2,000 pieces of military hardware, including tanks, mobile rocket launchers, and anti-aircraft systems.

It said it had been given “more than 2,500 tonnes of various types of ammunition and about 20,000 small arms”. Much of the equipment, it said, had not been used in combat before. Foreign Media said

The disarming of Wagner reflects efforts by the Russian authorities to defuse the threat posed by the private army and its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, although uncertainty remains about his fate.

Under the terms of the deal that ended the rebellion, he was supposed to go into exile in Belarus, but Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said last week that Wagner soldiers remained in their camps and Prigozhin was in Russia.