Russian President Vladimir Putin assured today that the plane in which the head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, crashed in August, was not shot down, revealed that remains of grenades were found inside the bodies of the occupants and suggested that they themselves were the causes of the tragedy.
“Fragments of hand grenades were found in the bodies of those killed in the air disaster. There were no external factors, that is a fact already confirmed, the result of the analyzes carried out by the Russian Instruction Committee,” Putin said during his speech at the Valday Debate Club held in the seaside resort of Sochi (Black Sea).
Putin, who has been accused by members of Wagner, the opposition and Western politicians of being responsible for the incident, regretted that specialists had not carried out medical tests to look for alcohol and drugs “in the blood of the deceased.”
“Although we know that after the incident at (Prigozhin's) company in St. Petersburg the Federal Security Service found not only 10 billion rubles ($100 million) in cash, but also 5 kilograms of cocaine,” he said.
In this way, the head of the Kremlin suggested that the same occupants of the plane were the causes of the tragedy that occurred on August 23. In turn, he highlighted that several thousand former Wagnerites have already signed contracts with the Armed Forces, something that Prigozhin had always refused to do.
“They want; and if they want, it means that they will take part in military actions,” he said, adding that by law private military companies do not exist in Russia and that the press gave that name to Wagner, who received state funding.
In fact, Putin recently met in the Kremlin with former Wagner commander Andrei Troshev, with whom he discussed the creation of “volunteer units” in the Ministry of Defense.
The day after the accident, Putin described the event as an “air disaster”, alluded to the “mistakes” committed by Prigozhin, alluding to the failed armed rebellion that he carried out two months earlier, and promised that the investigation would go “to the end.” to clarify what happened.
The presidential spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, who ruled out the possibility of the participation of international institutions in the investigation, has categorically denied that the head of the Kremlin gave the order to liquidate the leader of the Wagner Group, whose functions would now be carried out by other private companies attached to it. to the Ministry of Defense and by the National Guard.
According to the Russian press, the Interstate Aviation Committee, an entity based in Moscow that investigates incidents and accidents in the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), will not investigate this event in accordance with international standards.
The Center for Research and Prevention of Aeronautical Accidents of Brazil (Cenipa) and the Empresa Brasileira de Aeronáutica (EMBRAER), manufacturer of the damaged aircraft, expressed their willingness to participate in the investigation of the accident.
The Embraer plane in which Prigozhin was traveling along with nine other occupants, some senior officers of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, crashed on August 23 in the Tver region while en route from Moscow to Saint Petersburg. In mid-September, the Russian Government dismissed the head of the civil aviation agency (Rosaviatsia), Alexandr Neradko, whose structure confirmed the tragedy of Prigozhin's private Embraer plane.