Sergey Protosenya and Vladislav Avaev.
Some of the millionaires, all linked to Vladimir Putin in the past, ended the lives of their relatives before
Vladislav Avaev, Alexander Tyulyakov, Sergey Protosenya, Leonid Shulman, Mikhail Watford and Vasily Melnikov, all Russian oligarchs, have surprised by depleting their stock during the Ukraine war. They were not only united by their status as millionaires close to Vladimir Putin and their more or less direct relationship with the gas industry. They also had as a common denominator their positions against the invasion. They apparently took their own lives. All in strange circumstances inside their luxurious residences. In some cases they even killed relatives before.
The different police investigations have soon led to dead ends, thus fueling theories of political assassinations or suicides amplified after domestic fights for economic reasons after losing their immense fortunes due to the sanctions imposed by Western countries.
The macabre list began to be written in January, before the contest began. Leonid Shulman, the 60-year-old head of the Gazprom gas transport service, was found dead in the bathroom of a country house in the Leningrad region. Next to his body, the Police found a note confirming his suicide.
On February 25, a day after Kremlin troops breached the Ukrainian border, the deputy general director of the same firm’s Unified Settlement Center for Corporate Security, Alexander Tyulyakov, was found hanging from a beam in the garage of a country house near St. Petersburg. Also, there was a letter announcing that he had decided to end his life.
Mikhail Watford, born Mikhail Tolstosheya in the Ukraine in 1955, was found hanged at his British home in Surrey three days later. He was another of the great oil and gas tycoons. The lifeless body was found by a gardener in the absence of his wife and his three children. Apparently he himself decided to say goodbye to this world.
huge losses
Already in March, specifically on the 24th, the newspaper ‘Kommersant’ reported on the death of billionaire Vasily Melnikov in his luxury apartment in Nizhny Novgorod, the sixth largest city in Russia. Along with the body of Melnikov, who allegedly worked for the medical firm MedStom, those of his wife and his two sons, ages 10 and 4, were also found. All had wounds made with knives present at the crime scene. According to the Ukrainian media outlet Glavred, Melnikov’s company was suffering huge losses due to the sanctions.
The last two Russian oligarchs who said goodbye to this life chose to do so last week, although separated by 3,500 kilometers. On the 18th, former Gazprombank deputy chairman Vladislav Avaev was found dead by a relative in his multi-million dollar apartment on Universitetsky Prospekt in Moscow, along with his wife and his 13-year-old daughter. The flat was locked from the inside and Avaev was carrying a gun in one hand.
Finally, a day later, Sergey Protosenya, a former senior manager at Novatek, reportedly killed his wife and daughter before taking his own life in a rented villa in the Catalan town of Lloret de Mar for the Easter holidays. The 55-year-old millionaire was found hanged in the garden, while his relatives lay in their beds with stab wounds.
Suspicion about the Kremlin
It is unavoidable. Any strange death of a Kremlin opponent arouses suspicion. Cases have been abundant, some with global repercussions. In the collective memory survives the terrible agony of Aleksander Litvinenko, victim of polonium-210. The former member of the secret service, also a double agent for the British secret service (MI6), was accused of treason against the state, a sin that is paid for by death in Moscow.
In 2000 he was forced to flee to Britain, where he began working as a security consultant for investors. On November 1, 2006, he met in London with the Italian academic Mario Scaramella. In a restaurant he ate sushi while his table companion only drank water. He then headed to the Millennium Hotel bar, where he met two former Russian agents who are suspected of poisoning him over tea. On November 3, he was hospitalized with vomiting and a lot of pain. He had been poisoned. He died twenty days later.
Former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia had more luck, after a dose of the neurotoxic Novichok was sprayed on the door handle of the house; Alexei Navalny, Putin’s main opponent poisoned with a bottle of water, or Viktor Yushchenko, the president of Ukraine who almost died from TCDD dioxin.
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