The meeting underscored the Kremlin's attempt to show that the state had now gained control over the mercenary group after a failed June mutiny by Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Proscribing Wagner as a terrorist organisation would mean it would be a criminal offence in Britain to belong to or promote the group, arrange or address its meetings, and carry its logo in public.

The crash came two months after Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenaries staged a mutiny against Russian military commanders in which they took control of a southern city, Rostov, and advanced towards Moscow.

The Kremlin says Western suggestions that Yevgeny Prigozhin had been killed on its orders are an 'absolute lie'.

Now with Prigozhin believed dead, the fate of the complex, lucrative web of military and commercial operations he and Wagner created for Russia across Europe, the Middle East and Africa hangs in the balance.

Prigozhin's death would leave the Wagner Group leaderless and raise questions about its future operations in Africa and elsewhere.

Wagner was founded by Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin, a former special forces officer in Russia's GRU military intelligence.

The meeting was held on June 29, five days after the aborted mutiny, which is widely regarded to have posed the most serious challenge to Putin since he came to power on the last day of 1999.

Belarusian President Lukashenko says that the chief of Russia's Wagner group was still in Russia with thousands of fighters, but dismissed speculation that President Putin would have Yevgeny Prigozhin killed.

The attack on Prigozhin on state TV could not have been launched without the Kremlin's knowledge and may be part of an attempt to coerce Prigozhin into fulfilling his side of the deal to defuse the mutiny.

The phone call was said to be the highest-level contact between the two governments since the attempted mutiny.

The Wagner fighters were cheered enthusiastically by residents in Rostov-on-Don on Saturday when they briefly took control of the southern Russian city.