Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested on Thursday that Wagner private army boss Yevgeny Prigozhin and his men died when, while probably drunk and high, they accidentally set off a grenade during a flight that exploded and killed all on board in August.
Putin has blocked international investigators from examining the wreckage of the flight; his claims were based on a Russian government assessment of the remains of the plane.
Yevgeny Prigozhin – the long-time Putin ally who led one of the world’s largest and most active private military companies and who turned his army from the war in Ukraine to march to Moscow in protest, he said, at mismanagement at the Ministry of Defence – reportedly died in August in a plane crash over Russia. Observers, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, began to suggest almost immediately that the crash was not an accident, but a mopping-up operation against the leaders of the mutiny by the Putin regime. Some suggested an anti-air missile and planted bomb aboard destroyed the plane.
Putin, speaking in Moscow on Thursday, claimed he had been briefed by the “head of the Investigative Committee” and blamed Prigozhin himself for the crash based on the evidence they provided him.
The Russian President claimed it was “established fact” there was no external impact on the plane – exonerating himself from a missile attack on his rival’s plane if true – and that hand grenade fragments “were found in the bodies of those killed in the crash.”
Making implicit the view that those onboard had accidentally killed themselves by playing with a live grenade while under the influence of alcohol and drugs, Putin expressed his regret the investigation team had not taken the time to do a toxicology screening on the remains of the deceased to “determine whether alcohol or drugs were present.” Implying they were drug users, Putin said “we all know” the security services “found five kilograms of cocaine in the company’s office.”
“That’s all I can say,” Putin reportedly concluded.
While these fresh claims may be contested internationally, ultimately they cannot be easily disproven as Russia blocked an international investigation into the crash and conducted its own private inquiry. Prigozhin’s jet was a Legacy 600, made by Embraer in Brazil – meaning the Brazillian government could have joined the investigation and collected its own evidence, but could only have done so if invited by Russia, it was reported at the time.
British newspaper The Times of London reports the remarks of a former Wagner group commander who knew Prigozhin and his deputy Dmitry Utkin, who was also killed in the crash, saying he had never “noticed any signs that [Prigozhin or Utkin] used drugs. And neither of them drank.”
A period of speculation over who may have been behind what was called an assassination of Prigozhin followed the crash of the Wagner leader’s jet in August. Some Western nations, including France and the U.S., directly blamed the Kremlin, a move which received a sharp rebuke from a Chinese propaganda outlet that accused the West of “cognitive warfare” attempting to discredit Putin by “disrupting Russia’s internal unity and stability”.
Weeks after the crash, the Kremlin conceded the crash may have been deliberate, but nevertheless said it would not permit international involvement in the investigation.