Russian President Vladimir Putin raised some eyebrows when he suggested that the occupants of Wagner warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin’s private jet detonated hand grenades onboard, possibly while high on cocaine, resulting in a deadly crash.
Speaking at a meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club in the Black Sea resort of Sochi Thursday, Putin said that the head of Russia’s investigative committee had reported to him a few days ago that Prigozhin’s plane was blown up from the inside, not downed by a missile strike, while flying from Moscow to St. Petersburg.
“Fragments of hand grenades were found in the bodies of those killed in the crash,” Putin claimed. “There was no external impact on the plane — this is already an established fact.”
Putin did not say how a grenade could have been detonated aboard the Embraer jet — but he insinuated that some of the passengers may have been high or drunk during the fateful August 23 flight, saying that he thought investigators were wrong to have not tested the bodies of crash victims for drugs and alcohol.
“In my opinion, such an examination should have been carried out but it was not,” Putin said.
The Russian leader pointedly added that FSB raids on Wagner Group’s offices in St. Petersburg turned up 11 lbs of cocaine, along with $100 million in cash.
Although Putin noted that the investigation into the aviation disaster was not over, he appeared to be trying to repudiate US claims that Prigozhin’s jet carrying 10 people had been shot down by a missile.
On Friday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that investigators had not yet produced a final report on the cause of the crash, which occurred exactly two months after the Wagner chief led a short-lived mutiny against Russia’s military leadership.
Putin had publicly labeled Prigozhin a traitor, before agreeing to a truce with the mercenary.
After the jet went down in the Tver region, the Kremlin rejected as an “absolute lie” the notion that Putin had Prigozhin killed as payback for his rebellion.
Putin subsequently eulogized his former ally as a “talented businessman” who he said made some “serious mistakes.”