The black Christmas of the Russian oligarchs began in the west of Russia, in the city of Nizhny Novgorod. On December 7, the residents of an elegant building on Volodarski Street found the body of Grigory Kochenovbusinessman in the IT and technology sector, creative director of Agima and contributor to various western media.
(Read here: The wars that 2023 will have / Analysis by Mauricio Vargas)
Novgorod fell from the balcony of his apartment, while the police raided the residence after accusing him of pedophilia, accusations that his family and friends strongly deny. The designer and analyst had expressed several times his criticism of the invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops.
(See also: United States, the big winner of the year / Analysis by Mauricio Vargas)
On December 9, the turn went to the construction businessman Dimitri Zelenov. Co-founder of the firm Don-Troy, Zelenov was resting in the Antibes spa, on the French Riviera, when he felt unwell, lost his balance and hit his forehead. Hours later he passed away at a local hospital.
All eyes are on the Kremlin, because apart from these 20 deaths, there were dozens before the invasion.
After posting huge losses at his company – valued before the war at $1.4 billion – Zelenov, 50, and his associates questioned the invasion of Ukraine.
On December 24 there were two more deaths. The first was Alexander Buzakov, 66-year-old director general of the Russian Admiralty shipyards, who died at his home in St. Petersburgfor unknown reasons, the day after attending the launching of a new submarine produced by its shipyards for the Russian Navy.
The second death on the 24th was Pavel Antov, 65, a prominent businessman in the meat industry, known as the king of sausages. Antov was vacationing at a luxury hotel in Rayagada, India, when he fell from the third floor. His body was found in a pool of blood.
At first, the local authorities spoke of suicide and argued that Antov was devastated by the death of a friend. But suspicions arose immediately because, in June, the king of sausages had dared to criticize the invasion of Ukraine. Under intense pressure from Kremlin, he tried to take it back, but soon discovered that Vladimir Putin was not going to forgive him.
Rosary of strange deaths
As early as May, the New York Post had reported more than half a dozen bizarre deaths of prominent Russian businessmen, in a string that began on the eve of the invasion of Russia. Ukraine. Other American and European media paid attention to the string of strange deaths, especially one on the Spanish Costa Brava, on April 19.
That day, the police inspected the luxurious villa in Lloret de Mar where Sergei Protosenya, a former senior manager of the gas company Novatek, and holder of a personal fortune of more than 400 million dollars. Protosenya appeared hanged. Next to his body was a machete and an axe, with their bloody blades.
In some cases, the motive may be that of people who knew too much.
In another room of the house were the bodies of his 53-year-old wife Natalia and their 18-year-old daughter, whom Protosenya called “my princess.” Both had deep stab wounds. The initial version of a double murder committed by the businessman before committing suicide was soon questioned.
His death was very similar to that of another top gas industry executive, Vladislav Avayev, 51, a vice president at Gazprombank, whose body was found in an apartment in southwest Moscow hours before the bloody scene was discovered in the villa of the Protonsenya.
Avayev, his wife and their 13-year-old daughter were shot dead, and a pistol was in the businessman’s hand. For Russian police, Avayev killed mother and daughter before taking his own life. But soon after, Igor Volobuev, vice president of Gazprombank, claimed that his colleague had been murdered.
The first of these hardly credible suicides in 2022 occurred on January 30, near Saint Petersburg, as reported in an extensive article by the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. The victim was another man close to the gas industry, Leonid Shulman, 60, head of transportation services for Gazprom Invest. According to Russian authorities, his body was in the bathroom of his residence next to a suicide note in which Shulman allegedly complained of severe leg pain.
On February 8, the time came for Igor Nosov, executive director of the Corporation for Arctic Development, and former deputy governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region. At just 43 years old, Nosov suffered a sudden and devastating stroke.
Another executive from the gas world died on February 25. His name was Alexander Tyulyakov, he was 61 years old and he was a director of Gazprom. His body was found near St. Petersburg, hanging from a noose. Authorities also mentioned a suicide note, but its contents were not released.
Mikhail Watford, a billionaire thanks to numerous oil and gas businesses, died at his luxurious estate in Surrey, in the United Kingdom. Born in the Ukraine, he developed many businesses in Russia and changed his last name Tolstosheya to English Watford. His body was found with signs of hanging in the garage of his luxurious mansion.
repeating patterns
According to the official versions, some throw themselves out of the window, others kill their family and then commit suicide, others shoot themselves, others are hanged or drowned. Each of these deaths, seen in isolation, might not cause suspicion: apart from the similarities, what raises infinite doubts is the sequence.
Vasily Meldikov, 43, president and owner of the health sector firm MedStom, was found dead along with his wife and two children, ages 10 and 4, in the same city of other deaths, Nizhny Novgorod, on 23 of March. There was a knife next to Meldikov’s body. The official version was that he had killed his wife and his children, and then had committed suicide.
Under intense pressure, the sausage king tried to back down, but Putin would not forgive him.
Following the April deaths of Avayev and Protosenya, May brought two new victims: Andrei Krukovski, 37, the director of a Gazprom-owned ski resort, who fell off a cliff; and Alexander Subbotin, 43, a senior executive at the oil company Lukoil who authorities say died of a drug-induced heart attack in the middle of “a shamanic ritual” with Jamaican witches near Moscow.
Yuri Voronov, 61, was the director of a hydrocarbon transport company linked to Gazprom’s contracts in the Arctic. On July 4, his body was found in the Saint Petersburg region, shot in the head. In this case, even the Russian police did not dare to hint at suicide.
Dan Rapoport was an investor and finance executive, born in Latvia and based in Washington DC. A harsh critic of Putin, on August 14 he fell from his luxurious apartment in the West End and, although the local police are inclined to commit suicide, his wife rejects this version and other relatives blame the Kremlin.
On September 1, Ravil Maganov, 69, the chairman of Lukoil’s board of directors, also fell from above, out of a window, but in Moscow. They had admitted him to a hospital for an alleged depression, and according to the oil company, he was affected by a serious illness.
Ivan Pechorin, just 39 years old, drowned on a beach 160 kilometers from Vladivostok on September 10. He was the director of aviation for the Arctic Corporation, the same to which two other victims, Nosov and Voronov, were linked. In previous years he had been very close to the circle of power in the Kremlin.
Anatoly Gerashchenko was 72 years old and had extensive experience in military aviation, as director of the Moscow Aviation Institute, an entity that developed war technology. He died on September 21 when he fell down a long staircase of the building where he worked.
The final two victims before the four deaths of the holiday season are Pavel Chelnikov, 52, and Viacheslav Taran, 53. Chelnikov was in charge of a subsidiary of the Russian Railways. It is assumed that he shot himself on September 28, on the balcony of his Moscow apartment. His relatives said that he had no motive to take his own life.
Taran was the most successful Russian billionaire in the world of currencies and cryptocurrencies. On November 29, he was flying a helicopter from Swiss territory to the French Riviera, when the device crashed, and he and the pilot died.
Reviews or money?
Since many of these bizarre deaths are of oil and gas executives, it is difficult to attribute them to mere coincidence. “It’s more of an epidemic of murder,” as Bill Browder, a once-big Western investor in Russia and now a strong critic of Putin, told ABC News. Lukoil and Gazprom expressed their concerns about the invasion of Ukraine in private and even very restrained public statements.
Browder and other analysts also agree that behind many of these deaths may be the well-known “knew too much” motive. Investigators of the fortunes forged in the Putin era maintain that none of these billionaires is on their own, and that they are actually front men for the Kremlin leader.
That would explain why Putin’s loyal servants have died, many of whom spent time abroad and could fall, with all their information, into the hands of Western agencies. As Browder explains, “these people were sitting on huge flows of money and assets.”
All eyes are on the Kremlin because this type of death of adversaries, critics or even allies that had become uncomfortable did not begin in 2022: it is part of a Putin-era custom, with more than fifty suspicious deaths in more than Two decades. Putin, a former agent of Soviet intelligence, never forgot what he learned in his early years.
MAURICIO VARGAS L.
EL TIEMPO analyst
[email protected]
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