A Wagner Group camp in the Belarusian Mahiliow region is being dismantled only two months after construction began in late June, Radio Liberty Belarus reports.
Reporters published a Planet Labs satellite image taken on 23 August, comparing it to pictures from early August. According to their calculations, 101 tents out of 273 have been taken down, suggesting that some 2,020 mercenaries out of 5,000 may have left the camp.
Satellite imagery from early August shows that the deinstallation had already begun at the time — a mere month after the camp was set up.
Radio Liberty Belarus writes citing chat rooms associated with the private army that some Wagner’s fighters are being sent to Russia for long holidays. There are also reports about the redeployment of Wagner mercenaries to Africa.
On Wednesday — the day an Embraer jet presumably carrying Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin crashed in Russia’s Tver region — the investigative project Belarusian Hajun reported that an Il-76 aircraft of the Russian Air Force had arrived at an airfield near Minsk, unloaded, and flew to Tver the next day. The project has no information on who was on board the plane, but noted that, on the day of its arrival in Belarus, there were mobile internet outages in the village of Tsel, where the Wagner camp is located.