In the past three months, seven Russian millionaires have died under cryptic circumstances — some with their families. Most of them were involved in the oil and gas sectors.
April 19, Lloret de Mar, Catalonia: Spanish police receive a call from Fedor Protosenia, son of a Russian oligarch whose family owns a mansion in the city. He reports that for hours he tried to call his mother from France, but she wouldn’t answer the phone.
When the police arrive at the property, they find only the bodies of his parents and sister. Police assume that Fedor’s father, millionaire Serguei Protosenia, stabbed the two women to death and then hanged himself in the house’s garden. However, doubts about what actually took place quickly arise.
A day earlier, in Moscow, 3,000 km away, the police made another terrible discovery: Vladislav Avaiev, also a multimillionaire, his wife and 13-year-old daughter are dead in their luxurious apartment in the Russian capital. Russian state news agency Tass reported that he had a pistol in his hand. Authorities suspect he first killed his wife and daughter and then shot himself.
Both incidents took place within a 24-hour period, and the supposed courses of events are surprisingly similar. Furthermore, Protosenia and Avaiev were multimillion-dollar oligarchs from the highest echelons of the Russian oil and gas industries. Protosenia went on to be vice president of the natural gas company Novatek, while Avaiev served as vice president of Gazprombank.
The cases are the latest in a mysterious series of deaths of Russian oligarchs — mainly in the energy sector — that took place in 2022. In late January, a month before Russian troops invaded Ukraine, Leonid Schulman, 60, a manager of high level of the company Gazprom, would have committed suicide.
Then, on February 25, Alexander Tiuliakov, another former manager of the energy giant, was found dead in his home in St. Petersburg. Three days later, Ukrainian oil and gas tycoon Mikhail Watford was found dead in the garage of his country estate in Surrey, southern England.
On March 24, billionaire Vasili Melnikov, head of the medical supply company MedStom, was found dead with his wife Galina and two young children in their apartment in the Russian city of Ninzhni Novgorod. The details of the deaths also have parallels with those of Protosenia and Avaiev.
And then there is the case of Andrei Krukovski. The 37-year-old was the director of the Krasnaia Poliana ski resort, located near Sochi. Russian President Vladimir Putin is said to have repeatedly invited his friends to go skiing there. According to Russian newspaper Kommersant, Krukovski was hiking on May 2 when he fell off a cliff.
Links with the Kremlin?
The deaths of seven super-rich Russians in three months under such dire circumstances have sparked all sorts of speculation. Several media outlets speculated that the suicides could have been faked.
Some of them even suggested that the Kremlin — or even Putin himself — might be involved.
In recent years, there have been several dramatic assassination attempts on Kremlin critics. In August 2020, opposition leader Alexei Navalni was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok while at Tomsk airport. Two years earlier, Sergei Skripal, former head of the Russian intelligence agency GRU, was similarly poisoned. Both Navalni and Skripal survived.
In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian security officer who defected to the UK, was fatally poisoned with radioactive polonium in London. In 2017, the American newspaper USA Today published the results of an investigation that states that at least 38 oligarchs died or disappeared over three years. What is striking about the 2022 incidents is that none of the dead oligarchs were known to have made critical public comments about the invasion of Ukraine. At the same time, none of them were on the lists of international sanctions imposed after the invasion.
A text posted on social media by the Warsaw Institut, a Polish think tank specializing in Russia and security policy, said that both Russian police and Gazprom security services had quickly launched investigations into the places of the killings that took place in Russia. “Possibly, some people connected to the Kremlin are now trying to cover up traces of fraud in state-owned companies.”
There is no evidence to support this theory or about third-party involvement. In the case of Serguei Protosenia, Spanish police continue to assume that the deaths were homicide followed by suicide. However, Fedor Protosenia, son of the Russian oligarch, says he does not believe this was the case.
“My father is not a murderer,” he told several British media outlets.
