Putin says cocaine and grenades caused an enemy’s fatal plane crash, not an assassination attempt

Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested Thursday that the fiery death of mercenary Yevgeny Prigozhin in a crashed plane was caused by cocaine and grenades and not, as many suspect, a coordinated assassination attempt in retaliation for his insurrection.

Prigozhin’s days were numbered when he led the Wagner Group – his paramilitary mercenary group – in a brief but surprisingly violent uprising against Putin’s military last June. Prigozhin also openly criticized the Russian Defense Ministry, calling the invasion of Ukraine more or less a dumpster fire and claiming that the reasons for the invasion were lies.

On August 23, an Embraer Legacy 600 business jet crashed near Kuzhenkino in Tver Oblast, about 60 miles north of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport, where it departed. Yevgeny Prigozhin, Dmitri Utkin and Valery Chekalov – three key figures in the Wagner Group – were on board and were killed. Prigozhin reportedly received permission to leave Russia for Belarus shortly before his departure, but that could have been a trap. It is widely believed that it was an assassination attempt.

CBS News reports: “The Kremlin has rejected suggestions that it staged the crash as revenge for Wagner’s March on Moscow.”

The pressure grew on Putin to make a statement, and he did not disappoint. NBC News reports that in an Oct. 5 speech at the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi, Russia, about six weeks after Prigozhin’s plane fell from the sky, Putin told a “wild story that drugs and grenades caused the fatal crash.” . The plane had 11 pounds of cocaine and grenade fragments. A simple drug test would have proven this, he said.

U.S. officials told NBC News that intelligence suggests sabotage is the leading theory for the crash.

“I know there must be a question about what happened to the top management of the company,” Putin said. “The head of the investigative committee [Alexander Bastrykin] Just the other day he told me that hand grenade fragments had been found in the bodies of those killed in the plane crash.”

“Unfortunately, no tests were carried out for traces of alcohol or drugs in the blood of those killed, although we know this from the events we are all aware of [the uprising] the FSB [Russia’s intelligence agency] not just 10 billion found [rubles] in cash, but also 5 kilograms of cocaine in the St. Petersburg office” of Prigozhin’s company, Putin said.

Putin denied that a missile or projectile was responsible for the crash.

“There were no external impacts on the plane,” Putin said. “This is a proven fact, a fact confirmed by the investigation of the Russian Investigative Committee. The investigations are still ongoing.”

U.S. intelligence agrees it was not a missile but says Prigozhin’s plane crashed because of an explosive deliberately detonated on board.

Putin opponents tend to die terrible deaths

Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian FSB spy (the new KGB) who defected to England, died in 2006 after drinking tea laced with a radioactive substance called polonium-210, “the most dangerous substance known to man.” , was poisoned. It’s a rare radioactive isotope that gave him a slow, painful death. And it is produced only in Russia.

Litvinenko was vocally opposed to Russian politics and often commented on them. Litvinenko said he himself was hired to assassinate Putin’s opponents. On November 23, 2006, Litvinenko succumbed to radioactive poisoning.

Litvinenko said he was poisoned by Putin even though he lived thousands of miles away. The Daily Beast reports that even the men believed to have delivered the poison are known. As with Litvinenko’s apparent murder by poisoning, Prigozhin’s death is seen as an act of retaliation.

A post on Telegram said: “A quick summary: The most combat-ready unit in the history of modern Russia was commanded by alcoholics and drug addicts who, as professional soldiers, knew nothing about the rules for handling hand grenades.”

“However, the people of Russia will forever remember her differently.”

In 2018, Straight Cannabis and High Times reported that Tommy Chong said Donald Trump was “Putin’s bitch.” This was a Twitter/X response to a tweet from Rep. Don Beyer.

Putin is not only losing the war in Ukraine, but also the war on drugs.

According to research from the Brookings Institution, High Times reported that Russia has the highest number of heroin users per capita in the world. Over 2% of the entire Russian population are drug users. According to a 2022 study, a total of 18,013 people overdosed on illegal drugs in 2020 and 7,366 died as a result, a 16% increase compared to 2019. The use of injection drugs also led to skyrocketing HIV rates in the country.

The suspicious deaths of Putin’s enemies do not help the country’s image.