Mysterious deaths strike opponents of the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin down. Most of the deaths and murders remain unsolved to this day. BGNES Agency offers a list of the most famous victims of Putin's Russia.
Politkovskaya - killed on Putin's birthday
The most famous case is that of the journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovsaya, who was shot on October 7, 2006, in the elevator in front of the apartment where she lived. Her assassination coincided with the Russian president's birthday. Politkovskaya was born in New York to a family of Soviet diplomats of Ukrainian origin.
From 1999 until her murder, she worked for the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta, covering Putin's war against Chechnya. With her correspondence, she irritated both the Russian authorities and the pro-Russian Chechen elite, led by Ramzan Kadyrov. There is information that on the day she was killed, she was preparing material about the illegal torture of the Chechen security service. In May 2008, after an investigation, the Russian prosecutor's office named Rustan Makhmudov, who was declared an internationally wanted man, as the specific perpetrator of the murder.
In her book "Putin's Russia", Politkovskaya explains why she doesn't like the Russian president: "For cynicism. About racism. For the endless war. About the lies. About the gas in Nord-Ost. For the corpses of the innocents killed that accompanied his entire first term. Corpses that might not even exist.
Who poisoned Litvinenko?
Former KGB and FSB colonel Alexander Litvinenko is the first known case of poisoning attributed to the Putin regime. He became famous for his claims that he received orders from his direct superiors in the security service to kill Boris Berezovsky, who was one of the most powerful people in Russia in the 1990s. Litvinenko was removed from the FSB and later in 1999 was arrested on charges of exceeding his authority in an anti-terrorist operation in Kostroma.
In 2000, he managed to emigrate to Great Britain, where he was highly critical of the actions of the Russian president. There he published the book "Blowing Up Russia: Terror from Within" and "LPG - The Lubyanka Criminal Group", in which he accused Putin of being behind the series of bombings of residential buildings that became the pretext for the war against Chechnya in 1999. On the wave of this war Putin became president in 2000.
On November 1, 2006, he was unexpectedly admitted to hospital and died a few weeks later. It turns out that he was irradiated with the highly radioactive material Polonium-210. Scotland Yard launched an investigation that identified several sites of radioactive contamination linked to Litvinenko, including certain planes traveling from Moscow to London and Hamburg. Shortly before he died, Litvinenko publicly accused the Russian government of being behind his poisoning. His case was covered by the world media.
Nemtsov – killed "opposite the Kremlin"
Boris Nemtsov is one of the stars of Russian liberalism in the 1990s, minister and deputy prime minister, in 1999 together with Irina Khakamada and Sergey Kiriyenko created the Union of Right Forces. At that time, Russia was in a severe economic and political crisis, and Nemtsov was one of the politicians who did not rule out the coming to power of a strong man to replace the sick Boris Yeltsin. The SDF party was initially neutral towards Putin and his politics, even supporting him in some of his initiatives and looking for a partnership. Subsequently, Nemtsov became disillusioned with Putin and during his second presidential term was already one of his opponents. He left the SDS and even ran for president in 2008, but later withdrew his candidacy. Creates a party to fight corruption in Russia. On February 27, 2015, he was killed by an unknown perpetrator with four shots in the center of Moscow on one of the bridges opposite the Kremlin.
The mysterious suicides - fell from a window, hit his head on a railing
After the start of Russia's war in Ukraine, the high tension in the country erupted in a series of mysterious cases. Since the beginning of 2022, dozens of Russian businessmen have been found dead under unexplained circumstances. Many of them were officially declared suicides.
In July, 76-year-old Yevgeny Lobachev - a retired major general of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation - was found dead in Moscow. His death was ruled a suicide.
From December 24 to 26, 2022, there was a series of four mysterious deaths. On December 26, Pavel Antonov - the richest deputy of the Russian Duma (the Russian parliament) and a critic of Putin - died in India, falling from a hotel window. His companion, Vladimir Bidenov, was found dead in the same hotel four days earlier. Alexei Maslov, 69, a former head of the Russian ground forces, died in hospital on December 25, and Alexander Buzakov, who for a decade was the head of Russia's "admiralty shipyards", died on December 24.
Other deaths include the editor of a popular Russian propaganda magazine, the vice president of Gazprombank and a senior Gazprom official.
Suspicious deaths of prominent Russians are not limited to Russia's borders. In April 2022, Sergey Protosenya - a former deputy chairman of Novatek - was found hanging from a railing. His wife and daughter were found dead with stab wounds. Businessman Mikhail Watford was found dead at his home in Surrey, England, and another - Vladimir Bidenov - died in France after hitting his head on a railing.
Prigogine's last flight
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the private military company Wagner, was the only one who might have come within a hair's breadth of toppling Putin, but for unknown reasons gave up and paid with his life for it. The PMC he founded operated not only in Ukraine but also in Syria, Africa, and other hotspots where Moscow had its interests.
After prolonged months of clashes with the top military leadership over the way the war was being waged in Ukraine, Prigozhin led a rebellion. On June 23-24, the group led by him went on a march against Moscow. The riot was eventually ended after secret negotiations, and Prigozhin himself moved to Belarus.
The man who carried out the scheme to mobilize criminals from Russian prisons for the war against Ukraine was liquidated exactly two months after his private army marched on the Kremlin. On August 23, his plane was blown up. Together with him, the influential general Sergey Surovikin, who at one time commanded the Russian military forces against Ukraine, also disappeared from the political scene. The warlord, known by the nickname Argamedon, was on good terms with Prigogine. /BGNES
