Russia's Wagner mercenary group has been registered as "an educational organization" in the Asipovichy district in the eastern Belarusian region of Mahilyou.
According to the website of the Single State Registry of Companies and Individual Entrepreneurs of Belarus, Wagner was officially registered on August 4 as a limited company involved in "educational activities" headquartered in Tsel. The village is believed to be where troops with Yevgeny Prigozhin's company settled after Wagner’s aborted mutiny in Russia on June 23-24.
Last month, authorities in the Mahilyou region registered the Concord Management and Consulting company, whose activities are related to real estate management and which is owned by a company with same name as another owned by Prigozhin, Wagner’s founder and leader.
Two weeks earlier, RFE/RL obtained images from the Planet Labs service showing fortifications being actively constructed near Wagner's tent camp in Tsel.
Previous images from Planet Labs showed increasing numbers of equipment, trucks, and other types of vehicles arriving in Tsel. Last month, Prigozhin appeared to be in Belarus in a video welcoming his fighters and saying they would help to turn the country's army into the second-best in the world.
The fate of Prigozhin and his troops has been unclear since the mutiny, the biggest threat to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 23 years in power.
The authoritarian ruler of Belarus and Putin's close ally, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, was involved in talks ending the mutiny by agreeing with Prigozhin and Putin to host the Wagner troops and Prigozhin in Belarus.
Prigozhin has been spotted in Russia since and is suspected of moving between the two countries.
Days after Lukashenka’s statement, a tent camp began to appear in Tsel.
Wagner troops played a key role in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, helping take the main parts of the city of Bakhmut after nearly 10 months of intense fighting. Prigozhin has said he lost 20,000 men during the Bakhmut operation.