Gen. Pavel Grachev, a former Yeltsin's defense minister who led troops into Chechnya in the 1990s, died in Moscow under mysterious circumstances on Sunday. He was 64. In Russia, he is mostly know for the fact that he promised the then Russia's president Boris Yeltsin to "pacify" Chechnya in two hours.
The cause of death of Pavel Grachev, who died on September 23, remains a mystery. According to unofficial reports, the 64-year-old general died at Moscow Military Hospital after an alleged "stroke". It was also said that the general was suffering from an incurable disease". The most wide-spread version is that he ate deadly mushrooms during a visit to a friend and got poisoned.
Grachov was hated by Russian patriots, including Putin's KGB men, for allegedly damaging the Russian army during Yeltsin's liberal reforms.
He was admitted the to the hospital on September 11. Soon he condition improved, and nobody expected that he dies. According to rumors circulating in Moscow, the KGB men finished him off under Putin's order.
Gen. Grachov is a new victim in a long list of top Russian army generals, colonels and GRU staff whom Putin suspected of plotting against his KGB rule and preparing a military coup. All of them died under mysterious circumstances in fishy aircraft crashes, car incidents, poisonings, swimming in seas, taking baths in their Moscow apartments, "incidentally" falling from railroad stations under trains or "suicides" with two shots when they were already dead after the first one.
Department of Monitoring
Kavkaz Center
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