The Mystery of the Sudden Death of Russian Oligarchs Around the World

Over the course of 2020, nearly twenty prominent Russian figures died in uncertain circumstances and in varying ways on almost every continent of the world.

All of these men belong to the elite of Russian oligarchs who have criticized the effects of President Putin’s war in Ukraine, which makes their simultaneous and converging deaths raise many suspicions.

In her article published in The Atlantic, journalist Elaine Godfrey points to the Kremlin’s clear fingerprints in these mysterious incidents.

Several Russian oligarchs were targeted: a Russian meat trading giant, a Russian gas executive, an editor-in-chief of a Russian tabloid, a Russian shipyard manager, a Russian ski resort president, a Russian aviation official, and a Russian railway giant.

Pavel Antov, a prominent Russian sausage administrator and a man who reportedly lacked enthusiasm for Putin’s war on Ukraine, was found dead weeks ago in a hotel in India, just two days after the death of one of his Russian comrades in the same hotel.

Antov fell out of a hotel window, the meat industry millionaire and his deceased friend became the latest to join the list of people to fall victim to Russian sudden death syndrome, a phenomenon that has taken the lives of so many Russian businessmen, bureaucrats, oligarchs, and journalists in a shocking way.

The list of these deaths, which includes alleged window throws, suspected poisonings, suspicious heart attacks, and supposedly suicides, is remarkable because of the variety of causes of unnatural death, as well as its length and the many names it has so far.

 

Death List

Nearly twenty prominent Russians died in 2022 in mysterious ways, some of them extremely hideous.

The bodies of gas industry leaders Leonid Schulman and Alexander Tyulakov were found with suicide letters near them early last year.

Within a month, three other Russian executives, Vasily Melnikov, Vladislav Avayev, and Sergey Protosenya, were found dead along with their wives and children in what appeared to be murders and suicides.

In May, Russian authorities found the body of Andrei Krukovsky, owner of the Sochi resort, at the foot of a hill, and one week later, Alexander Subbotin, director of a Russian gas company, died in a house owned by a shamanist in Moscow, after he was allegedly poisoned with a frog-derived drug known as “Toad Venom” (a hallucinogenic drug and compound that became popular in specific doses last year).

Last July, the body of Energy Executive Yuri Voronov was found floating in his swimming pool in a suburb of St. Petersburg after being shot in the head.

In August, Dan Rapoport, one of Putin’s critics, appeared to fall from the window of his Washington, D.C., apartment a mile from the White House, and Ravel Maganov, the head of a Russian oil company, soon followed, falling from a sixth-floor window in a Moscow building.

In the same vein, Grigory Kochenov, the director of an IT company, fell from a balcony in early December, and a businessman from Russia’s top real estate giants died after falling down the stairs the same month.

It may be said that at least some of these deaths may be natural or accidental due to Russia’s exceptionally low life expectancy and uncontrolled rate of alcoholism—and being Russian doesn’t mean you’re not prone to falling casually from a window on an upper floor.

Sometimes people actually kill themselves, as the suicide rate among Russian men is one of the highest on record in the world. According to Edward Luttwak, a historian and military strategist, this is at least part of what is happening.

He says that collective despair has spread among Russia’s interconnected and privileged elite. “Imagine what happens to a globalized country when sanctions kick in,” he told me. “Some of them will commit suicide, he said.

However, the terrible prevalence of these premature deaths warrants a closer look.

 

Hidden Kremlin Fingerprints

Many of the aforementioned deaths exude methods long used by the Kremlin, and there are precedents for this phenomenon.

In 2020, Russian agents poisoned opposition figure Alexei Navalny with a nerve agent, but their attempt to kill him failed

 A decade earlier, they had succeeded in a similar attempt to target Alexander Litvinenko, a defector from the Russian security services. In 2004, when Viktor Yushchenko ran against a Kremlin-backed rival, he was poisoned with dioxin that eventually disfigured him.

Thirty years ago, Bulgarian intelligence, with the help of the KGB, killed dissident Georgi Markov by stabbing him on London’s Waterloo Bridge with an umbrella tip contaminated with ricin.

Luttwak told me that Russian agents often “people who do assassinations for commercial purposes look at [their methods] and laugh.”

Suicide is difficult to decipher. For oligarchs who failed to show enough loyalty to Putin, persuasion to commit suicide is not an implausible scenario.

Michael Weiss, a journalist and author of a forthcoming book by Russia’s military intelligence agency (GRU), said that “it’s common for one of these people to say, ‘We can get to you, or you can do a manly act and commit suicide, so you get yourself off the chessboard, and then at least you have the ability to eliminate yourself.’”

Did Antov really fall out of his window in India? Or did a Kremlin agent push him out the window? Or did he receive a threatening call to his family that left him no choice but to throw himself out the window? Weiss says all of these possibilities are on the table.

Imagination plays a pivotal role in the world of mysterious killings of the Kremlin, which seem to come from the Middle Ages.

Window throwing has been the preferred method of dislodging political opponents since multi-story buildings existed, but Russia has monopolized this practice in modern times.

In Russia, these assassinations are known as “mokroye delo” or “wetwork” (referring to what is involved in throwing from above that a person dies soaked in their blood)

Sometimes the primary goal of killing in this way is to convey a message to others: “We will kill you and your family if you are a traitor.” Other times, the goal is to get rid of an annoying person.

A few years after Russian informant Alexander Perepilichnyy died while running outside London in 2012, at least one autopsy report indicated the presence of chemical residues in his stomach linked to the highly toxic plant gelsemium.

“These are the clues of evidence that the Russians are fond of using,” Weiss said, as if they were deliberately leaving fingerprints on them, without legally being considered a killing. “They want us to know that it was murder, but they don’t want us to be able to definitively conclude it was murder,” he added.