From the clip, Putin doesn’t say it explicitly, but that seems to be what he is inferring.
Putin is remaining quite vague, as he is wont to do. Puting words he did not say in his mouth (no, he did not say that Prigozhin was drunk) discredits the Western press, as he can point out this mistake and say: “See, you just can’t trust them!”. That has been his modus operandi for decades, I am appalled that a professional makes this mistake in his haste to be the first to break the news on f*ing twitter. Stupid and annoying. Unnecessary.
To explain why this “minor” mistake makes me angry I will give you an example. I’ll start saying that Putin always tells the truth. A highly distorted and warped truth, to be sure, and the distortion is interested and serves a purpose, but there is always a kernel of truth in his declarations. It is the same with Trump, only he does not always manage to tell even a kernel of truth, but often enough. So when Marjorie Soylent Green says that the forest fires in California were caused by “Jewish space lasers”, that is a flat out stupid lie. When Trump says they were caused by the undergrowth that had not been racked and cleared away, there is a bit of truth in that. It was not the cause (that was the high temperatures, probably caused by climate warming, and the high winds, also probably infuenced by climate change, and the drought, again because of climate change) but it gives his supporters a narrative that they want to believe.
It is the same here: there was no outside infuence on the crash, Putin claims, by which he means there was no missile shot at the plane. That a parcel had been loaded in the very last minute on the plane in Moscow with “a crate of expensive wine”, a parcel that may well have contained a bomb, he silently glosses over. When this parcel exploded (if it did, we do not know for sure) it may well have set off the hand grenades Prigozhin and Co. may well have been carrying, but it was still a murder operation from the FSB. And that there was cocaine found on his residence in St. Petersburg hints at cocaine abuse by Prigozhin, but there was no cocaine found on the bodies, because it was not searched for, which he now regrets: “It shoud have been examined.” The fact that Prigozhin’s cocaine may well have been used to traffic, or to give to the Wagner troops in Ukraine as a stimulant before battle, like the German pilots in WWII were given ephedrine in large doses to fight, he also does not mention. He just hints at the possibility that they might have been high. He is subtle, and his accolites lap it up, because it is not entirely wrong. When Max Seddon then writes
Putin claims Prigozhin’s plane crashed because the Wagner leadership got drunk and/or high, then set off hand grenades during the flight.
this is distorting what Putin said. I am not claiming that Putin’s story is true to the last detail. I am claiming that to expose his lies you have to listen more carefully. A professional journalist should not have written that.
And I fear he wrote in a hurry that to be the first to reveal this scoop, so he mangled together what he heard in a tedious conference where plenty of lies, half-truths and distortions were told, sitting uncomfortably on the chairs in the audience, without a desk or a computer, just his phone, and he published that on twitter. By which he is just playing Putin’s game. As I wrote above: this was not necessary.
Still, what Putin really said is interesting, thanks for posting it here. And the head of the team leading the investigation allowed him to say it in public, because “that is a proven fact”. As if Putin ever needed the permission of a subordinate to say whatever he pleased. Man, that asshole is cunningly clever.
I’m not sure I’d agree with that.
I’ll agree w @Pardel-Lux that Putin often delivers a pebble of truth embedded in a house-sized boulder of bullshit.
I’ll also suggest that @Pardel-Lux is waay, waay off base labeling said bullshit-boulder-delivery as “telling the truth”. Nope. It’s lying pure and simple. The intent is to deliver a message contrary to the facts. And when someone receives the message as intended, they have been given an understanding wildly at odds with the facts. That’s called “lying.”
I’m reminded of an old proverb:
Q: What do you call a barrel of sewage with a thimble of wine in it?
A: Sewage.
and for good measure:
Q: What do you call a barrel of wine with a thimble of sewage in it?
A: Sewage.
I don’t think his point was whether Putin was on the “truth” side of the “truth-lie” binary, but that in order to understand what is actually happening, it is useful to know that Putin tends to lie by omission more than / rather than commission, and for that reason, it is useful to have his precise words as signposts to reality.
Jumping the gun and attributing one’s conclusions to Putin as if he voiced them distorts a measured analysis, and isn’t helpful.
And also no different than what MTG said about the “Jewish space lasers”, which was this:
I can’t pinpoint any actual lie in there, though there are some factual errors. Or even any outright claim about Jews. It’s just a deranged mess of speculation and JAQing off, and of course anything with the Rothschilds is usually an antisemitic dogwhistle. No different than what Putin does, though even more unhinged.
It’s right there at the end: “I just like to read a lot”
You got me there… though in my defense, reading doesn’t necessarily imply understanding.