Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a statement that Wagner Group founder Yevgeny. Grenade fragments have been found among the bodies of victims of the crash in which Yevgeny Prigozhin was killed, suggesting the crash was caused by an explosion inside the plane.
Prigozhin was killed in August when the Embraer plane carrying him and other senior members of Wagner's paramilitary group crashed after taking off from Moscow. Mr. Putin's comments on Thursday were consistent with propaganda in Kremlin-controlled media. Russian state media have ignored indications that Mr. Prigozhin may have been killed by the Kremlin as a result of an attempted mutiny this summer, instead offering a different version of his death.
U.S. officials say Mr. Prigozhin was most likely assassinated.
"Grenade fragments were found among the bodies of the victims of the air crash," Mr. Putin said at a meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. "It is an established fact that the aircraft was not affected by external forces."


A photo posted on Wagner's affiliated Telegram channel shows the wreckage of a burning plane in Russia in August.

Prigozhin's mutiny and death have left the Kremlin with a public relations problem. While despised and feared by Mr. Putin's inner circle, Mr. Prigozhin is a hero to a large number of disaffected veterans and ordinary Russians for railing against alleged laziness and corruption in the Russian military.
While Mr. Putin has mostly avoided speaking publicly about Mr. Prigozhin, Russian state media have circulated a variety of theories about how he died, from a simple plane crash to an assassination by Western security services.
Opinion polls show few Russians blame the Kremlin for Prigozhin's death, with most believing his death was an accident or the work of Western security services.
In his speech on Thursday, Putin said members of the Wagner group who died in the plane crash should have been tested for drugs and claimed five kilograms of cocaine had been found during a search of Wagner's offices in St. Petersburg.
"Regrettably, the blood of the deceased was not tested for the presence of alcohol or drugs," Putin said. "I think there should have been testing, but there wasn't."
In the wake of Prigozhin's death, Russian security groups loyal to the Kremlin have been moving to rein in Wagner's military forces in Ukraine and Africa.
Putin said the Russian military is also absorbing former Wagner fighters, and thousands of personnel have signed up with regular Russian defense units to rejoin the fight in Ukraine. "They can take part in this fight if they want to," he said.
Mr. Putin spent nearly four hours speaking and answering questions at the annual meeting of the Valdai International Debating Club. Mr. Putin has attended the club's annual meetings in the past, and at one point Western journalists and Kremlin experts were among the guests.
With relations between Russia and the West plummeting over Ukraine, almost no Western experts have attended the annual meeting of the Valdai International Debating Club, and Putin has increasingly used the occasion to attack what he calls the West's hypocrisy and imperialist values.
Putin also said that the United States is trying to maintain its hegemony in the world and is the initiator of the war in Ukraine. He said Russia had drawn a line in the sand in Ukraine.
"We did not start the so-called war in Ukraine," he said. "Instead, we are trying to end this war."