The Latest Victim Was Wagner Leader: The Story of 14 Putin Opponents Killed in Mysterious Circumstances

Although Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to praise his former aide and the leader of the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, he couldn’t conceal his lingering resentment toward him. Some observers consider this as a subtle “implicit suggestion” that he might have been involved in Prigozhin’s death.

Observers believe this hint is a message to deter Putin’s opponents and restore his authority, which was shaken when Prigozhin rebelled against him in an attempt to advance towards Moscow, only to backtrack in June 2023.

Even though Putin declared amnesty for the leader of the mercenaries and his group after they abandoned their rebellion within 24 hours, without facing any legal consequences or imprisonment, Prigozhin returned to Russia.

In the days following the rebellion, Putin received his warlord, Prigozhin, in the Kremlin, which raised questions and mystery about what transpired in this meeting and whether Putin decided to assassinate him afterward.

Ironically, Russia officially announced the death of the Wagner leader on August 24, 2023, due to a plane crash, revealing a long list of Putin’s opponents he eliminated since the start of the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

Al-Estiklal has identified 13 various Russian individuals from the military, political, and economic spheres who were removed by Putin.

Prigozhin, having joined them, became the 14th on the list of individuals closely associated with Putin who met suspicious ends.

 

Mysterious Endings

The mysterious endings that befell these personalities raised doubts in Western media about the reasons for the deaths of those close to the Kremlin ruler.

As the list of Putin’s victims grew, Le Figaro wondered on December 27, 2022, if the deaths of many Russian oligarchs (the ruling elite) under strange circumstances since the start of the Russian invasion were a “coincidence.”

The first of Putin’s mysterious victims was Leonid Shulman, the CEO of Gazprom, a well-known Russian company specializing in natural gas extraction, processing, and transportation. He was said to have “committed suicide.”

He died on January 30, 2022, less than a month before Putin launched the military invasion of Ukraine. His body was found in his sauna in St. Petersburg, along with a “suicide note,” and it was rumored that he opposed the idea of war at the time.

On February 25, 2022, the day following the invasion of Ukraine, another Gazprom executive, Alexander Tyulakov, the company’s CFO, suddenly died. He was found hanging in his garage near St. Petersburg.

The reason was not officially announced, but while forensic doctors were analyzing the alleged suicide, several large Gazprom security vehicles arrived, expelled the police, and cordoned off the crime scene, raising suspicions, according to the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta.

Later, on March 24, 2022, billionaire Vasily Melnikov was also found dead in his apartment in the western Russian city of Novgorod, along with the bodies of his wife and 13-year-old daughter, who were stabbed.

The incident was falsely framed as him killing his family before committing suicide. However, neighbors and relatives, as reported by the local newspaper Kommersant, denied this narrative, stating that they were a close-knit family with no problems, suggesting the involvement of a third party.

Similar suspicions arose when the fourth victim, former Vice President of Gazprombank, Vladislav Avayev, was found dead in his Moscow apartment alongside his wife and 13-year-old daughter, who had gunshot wounds, on April 18, 2022.

He had also held significant positions in the Kremlin and the State Duma, raising doubts among those close to him about who might have killed him, despite the official narrative that he killed his family before committing suicide.

A neighbor told Newsweek on April 27, 2022, that he did not believe it, saying that he had no reason to do that; maybe they were killed.

The pattern continued on April 19, 2022, when Russian billionaire Sergei Protasenya and his 18-year-old daughter were found dead in their vacation home in Lloret de Mar, Spain, where they were spending their holiday.

Sergei was hanging from a tree in his villa, seemingly having hanged himself, while his wife and daughter were found stabbed to death. A bloodied axe and knife were discovered at the scene.

As usual, Russian investigators claimed that the businessman killed his wife and daughter before committing suicide, but one of his neighbors told the Daily Mail on September 13, 2022, that he did not believe it, saying he was drunk and fell into the water.

 

More Victims

On July 4, 2022, the sixth victim, Yury Voronov, a businessman who chaired a Gazprom affiliate, was found dead in his swimming pool at his residence in St. Petersburg, with a gunshot wound to the head. A gun was discovered at the bottom of the pool, and investigators could not determine whether it was a suicide or an assassination.

However, the investigation committee focused on a “business partner dispute,” while his widow believed he was deceived by “collaborators” and murdered.

In addition, Ivan Pechorin, the director of the Russian Far East and Arctic Development Corporation, was killed on September 10, 2022. He had been appointed by Putin to improve energy and mining resources in eastern Russia in response to international sanctions since the war in Ukraine.

It was said that his body was found in the Sea of Japan, off the coast of eastern Russia, and he fell into the water from a sailboat and couldn’t swim, according to Daily Mail on September 13, 2022. However, Russian media reported that he was “drunk and fell into the water.”

The ninth victim was Anatoly Gerashchenko, an aviation expert and prominent figure in the field of aviation. He died under mysterious circumstances on September 21, 2022, according to the Moscow Institute where he worked.

The newspaper Moskovskij Komsomolets, a popular Russian newspaper, reported that he died in an accident. He fell from an unsecured staircase while visiting a construction site.

On December 9, 2022, Dmitry Zelenov, a Russian real estate mogul who had criticized the Russian invasion of Ukraine, was also killed. He died in the middle of the night after dinner with friends. It was said that he became dizzy on the stairs, fell, and his head hit something heavy, causing his death. However, according to Italian newspapers, Zelenov was one of the critics of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, making him the tenth victim.

On December 25, 2022, Pavel Antov, a Russian politician and member of the United Russia party led by Putin, was found dead after criticizing the invasion of Ukraine. He was said to have fallen from a window in India.

The Russian Consul General in Kolkata, Alexey Idamkin, told the official TASS news agency that Antov (65 years old) “fell” from a window, and there were no suspicions of assassination, making him victim number 11.

In December 2022, Ravil Maganov, the CEO of Russia’s giant oil company Lukoil, the second-largest oil producer in the country, was found dead after falling from a hospital window in Moscow, making him victim number 12.

The circumstances surrounding his fall were unclear, and the Russian news agency Interfax reported that he fell from a window at the central hospital and died as a result of injuries sustained in the fall, even though the reason for Maganov’s presence at the hospital in the first place was not known!

However, the board of directors of Lukoil, where Maganov worked, had issued a statement in March 2022 expressing deep concern about the tragic events in Ukraine and calling for the end of armed conflict through negotiations, indicating a possible motive for his killing.

Newsweek also recounted another case of Marina Yankina, a Russian defense official who was found dead after falling from a window in St. Petersburg. She was the 13th victim.

Yankina headed the financial support department at the Ministry of Defense in the Western Military District in St. Petersburg. Police found her body beneath the windows of a tall building in the Kalininsky district of St. Petersburg, and it was alleged that she had committed suicide.

 

Why He Killed Him

When Prigozhin initiated his armed rebellion challenging the Kremlin due to losses in Ukraine, Western officials anticipated that Putin would seek revenge against the mercenary leader.

After two months since the operation, which Putin described as a “stab in the back” and “betrayal,” these expectations seem to have indeed materialized in a deliberate and brutal manner, sending a threatening message to other Kremlin adversaries.

According to AP on August 24, 2023, the message was clear: “Anyone who dares to cross the Kremlin will perish.”

The Kremlin-backed political expert Alexei Mukhin stated that the plane crash provided Putin with a diabolical aura that his adversaries could not ignore. He emphasized that foreign Kremlin foes would increasingly feel insecure.

In this operation, Putin did not stop at eliminating the Wagner butcher, who, in turn, had killed hundreds in Libya, Africa, Ukraine, and elsewhere.

He also eliminated a select group of his associates, including Dmitry Utkin, a former military intelligence officer who managed Wagner’s operations, and Valery Chekalov, its security chief.

Tatiana Stanovaya, a researcher at the Carnegie Russia-Eurasia Center, explained to Foreign Affairs magazine on August 23, 2023, that there were numerous reasons motivating Putin to rid himself of the Wagner group leader, Prigozhin.

She emphasized that Putin was interested in neutralizing those who dared to organize a rebellion against him.

She stressed that even if Putin tried to portray it as a mere accident, Russian elites and top officials would view it as a vengeful act.