....it was a crash, wasn't it?
Why are you asking? :)
You wrote that "no gov or any other important group travels together" and my point was that sometimes they do. On the board of the Polish plane that crashed in RuSSia in 2010 there were, besides the Polish president and his wife, two deputy Marshals of the Senate, the deputy Marshal of the Sejm,
the chief commanders of all types of the Polish army, The Chief of the National Security Bureau, Polish MPs and senators and a bunch of other more or less important people.
You are giving him too much credit here.
I agree.
Putin launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine that has resulted in the deaths of thousands of civillians and his own soldiers. Why would anyone think that Putin cares about collateral damage?
And it was/is suspected that Putin was behind the 1999 bombings in RuSSia that were used to justify the second war in Chechnya, which gave Putin rise to power and popularity:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Russian_apartment_bombings
rferl.org/a/putin-russia-president-1999-chechnya-apartment-bombings/30097551.html