Earlier this year, Parliament's Foreign Affairs Select Committee produced a report condemning the government's "remarkably complacent" approach to the group and criticised its "dismal lack of understanding of Wagner's hold beyond Europe, in particular their grip on African states".

On Thursday, Alicia Kearns - chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee - urged the government to take "a more strategic approach towards [private military companies] operating across all conflict zones".

As UK government lawyers were poring over the finer legal details, in preparation for the Home Office's announcement on 5 September of the intended ban, the Kremlin was already busy dismantling Wagner's power.

But as an extended arm of Kremlin policy in troubled parts of the world like Mali and Libya, Wagner - or whatever it may be rebranded as - still has the capacity to make money out of war, instability and alleged atrocities.

Anton Mardasov, a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute's Syria Program, told the BBC that despite the loss of Prigozhin, Wagner had managed to "maintain some autonomy for now" in its more distant African deployments.

And Arab media has reported that Russia's Deputy Defence Minister Yunus-bek Yevkurov ordered Wagner to either withdraw from Syria, or join Russian forces operating there by the end of September.

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