Updated 01:14 | Published 00:52
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Booze, cocaine and playing with hand grenades were behind Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death.
Putin hinted at that during a marathon interview on Thursday.
Then he threatened the world with nuclear weapons.
Putin was questioned at an annual event at the Valdai think tank in Sochi. The interview lasted more than three hours, was broadcast on Russian television, and wildly diverged between different topics.
Last year the headlines were about Putin’s attempt to joke about nuclear weapons. This year the rhetoric was harsher and more confrontational. According to The Guardian’s translation he opened for Russia to resume nuclear weapons tests, a demand recently made by, among others, the TV profile Margarita Simonjan.
According to Putin’s argument, Russia can withdraw its approval of the 1996 Test Ban Treaty because the United States is among the countries that have not ratified it.
– I am not ready to say whether we really need to carry out tests or not, but it is theoretically possible to behave in the same way as the United States, Putin said according to The Guardian.
Answered about new nuclear doctrine
He also spoke out about the Russian nuclear doctrine. It states that Russia can use nuclear bombs in response to a nuclear attack, but also to an attack with conventional weapons if “the very existence of the Russian state is threatened.”
According to the news agency AP some Russian experts have called for the doctrine to be tightened to increase pressure on the West.
From the stage, Putin said he sees no reason to rewrite the document.
– Everything can be changed, but I just don’t see any need for it. I don’t think any sane person with a working memory would consider using nuclear weapons against Russia.
He was all the more offensive about what would happen if Russia were to be nuked first.
– If such an attack is detected, hundreds, hundreds of our missiles would appear in the air and not a single enemy would have a chance to survive, he said according to Reuters.
Putin: Successful test of missile
Putin also said that the Sarmat conventional nuclear missile, known in the West as “Satan-2”, is only details away from being used in combat.
He also stated that Russia has conducted a successful test of the Burevestnik experimental missile powered by a nuclear reactor. He did not give details of when or where the postponement would have taken place, but earlier this week reported the New York Times that such a test may have been planned at a Russian base in the Arctic.
International experts are skeptical about whether Burevestnik really works, and according to the AP, an attempt as recently as 2019 failed when the missile exploded, killing seven people.
The words about Prigozhin’s death
In the marathon interview, Putin also spoke about the plane crash that killed Wagner founder and rebel Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Intelligence sources in the United States stated early that they were working on the theory that Prigozhin was killed on Putin’s orders and that a bomb may have been planned aboard the plane.
The Kremlin has previously denied the information, but never in such detailed terms as Putin used in Sochi on Thursday. He suggested that Prigozhin and the other Wagner highs caused their own deaths by playing with hand grenades on the aircraft while drunk or high.
– The Chairman of the Investigative Committee reported to me the other day that hand grenade fragments have been found in the bodies of those who died in the plane crash, Putin said according to NBC News translation.
He went on to claim that Russia’s FSB security service found 10 million rubles in cash and five kilos of cocaine in a raid on Wagner’s headquarters in St Petersburg after the aborted uprising last summer.
– Unfortunately, no samples were taken for traces of alcohol or drugs in the blood of those who died.