The Kremlin said today that the status of the private mercenary organization Wagner should be “reviewed”, a day after President Vladimir Putin said the organization had no legal basis.

Putin told a Kommersant newspaper reporter yesterday that Wagner, which staged a brief armed rebellion last month, “does not exist” in a legal sense because there is no law in Russia relating to private paramilitary companies.

The representative of the Kremlin Dmitry Peskov he told reporters that the status of companies like Wagner’s is “rather complicated” and needs to be looked into.

Asked if there was a possibility of new legislation regarding the status of private paramilitary companies, he said: “This issue will at least be under consideration.”

Putin told Kommersant that he offered Wagner’s men to serve under someone else’s command, but their leader Yevgeny Prigozhin refused the offer after his failed mutiny. Kommersant clarified that the man Putin was referring to is a Wagner commander nicknamed “Sedoi” (Grey Hair) who, according to the Russian president, has been the real commander of paramilitaries on the Ukrainian front for the past 16 months. “Sedoi” is the alias of Andrei Troshev, according to European Union sanctions documents, French official documents, sources with knowledge of the matter and Russian media reports.