In a remarkable series of coincidences …
A list you don’t want to make
Russian losses of conscripted soldiers involved in the “special military operation” in Ukraine have been overwhelming. But will they be outstripped by the increasing, and increasingly mysterious, casualties among a very different demographic—executives and oligarchs who have been critical of Vladimir Putin? Euronews.com has provided an eyebrow-raising tally:
- Ivan Pechorin, manager at the Corporation for the Development of the Far East and the Arctic, allegedly fell off his luxury yacht and drowned in the Sea of Japan last month. “Pechorin is said to have been tasked with modernizing Russia’s aviation industry and worked directly under Putin,” said the news service.
- Igor Nosov, the same company’s general director, died last year, reportedly of a stroke. He was a mere 43.
- Just before Pechorin drowned, Ravil Maganov, chairman of the oil company Lukoil—which had called for an end to the Ukraine invasion—officially “passed away following a severe illness,” which turned out to be a fall from a Moscow Central Clinical Hospital window. He had been smoking and “tripped”—as one does when one smokes.
- Another Lukoil executive, Alexander Subbotin, 43, was found dead of “heart failure” in May at the Moscow home of “a self-styled healer … who practiced purification rites,” according to Euronews. Not suspicious at all.
- Anatoly Gerashchenko, 73, former head of the Moscow Aviation Institute, died last week after a fall down “several sets of stairs.” The home is the most dangerous of places.
- Nikolai Glushkov, former deputy director of the Russian airline Aeroflot and a Kremlin critic, 68, was found hanged in his home in London in 2018. An inquest concluded it was murder made to look like suicide.
- An exiled Putin critic and oligarch friend of Glushkov’s, Boris Berezovsky, had been found dead in 2013 at his home near Ascot in Berkshire “with a ligature around his neck.” An inquest reached an “open verdict”—inconclusive but suspicious. (That death immediately followed the poisoning of the double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury.)
The list goes on. “At least another eight Russian oligarchs have died in strange circumstances almost since the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine,” reported Euronews. Something close to an epidemic. “All had in common close links to the Kremlin, immense wealth, a connection to Russian gas and an anti-war stance on Ukraine.”
