Russian Murder Mystery?

THE OVERLOOK

By Tom Clavin

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          It just happened again – a prominent Russian, connected to Vladimir Putin, dying mysteriously.

          The latest unusual death was reported last week. It was initially announced that Vladimir Makei, the long-serving Foreign Minister of Belarus, had suffered a heart attack after returning from a meeting with Putin in Armenia. But staffers at the Belarus media outlet Nasha Niva were not convinced and did some digging. It turned out that four days after the meeting with Putin, Makei killed himself. According to Nasha Niva, “Makei’s friends say he was painfully upset by the collapse of the course he was leading.”

          As you can imagine, Russian officials are not thrilled that Nasha Niva did some real reporting.

          This mysterious death and the way it was first portrayed fits into a curious pattern of strange demises among Russian officials, allies, and business leaders. Last December, the Russian sausage magnate-turned-lawmaker Pavel Antov died in India after falling from the third floor of his hotel, according to the Indian police. Antov’s death came after his friend and travel companion Vladimir Budanov died, supposedly of a heart attack, on Antov’s 65th birthday, two days earlier. Indian police officials contend that Budanov, who was 61 years old, had a preexisting heart condition.

          Indian officials said at the time of the deaths of the two men that the Russian embassy had been contacted and procedures followed. Permission had been given for cremation of the bodies of both men. Last week, the Russian Consul General in Calcutta, Alexey Idamkin, told Russian state media RIA Novosti that the Odisha State Police and the Consulate General in Calcutta did not see anything suspicious in the death of two Russians in India: “We are aware of the deaths of two Russian citizens. We are in touch with the relatives of these people and the police department of the city where it happened. We will provide the relatives of the deceased with all the necessary assistance in paperwork.”

In the wake of Antov’s plunge from the third floor of his hotel in the Rayagada district, the case was ruled an “unnatural death,” which includes deaths resulting from accidents and suicides. In 2018, Antov topped the Forbes ranking of the 100 richest civil servants in Russia. His income in 2018 amounted to about 9.97 billion rubles. He was a member of the Russian parliament’s United Russia party, which was formerly headed by Vladimir Putin and is still staunchly supportive of the Russian president.

Antonov pledged his support for Putin last June when he was forced to deny having posted an anti-war message on WhatsApp. He blamed an “unfortunate misunderstanding and a technical error” and said the status had been deleted.

The most recent deaths are in addition to at least a dozen high-profile Russian businessmen who have reportedly died by suicide or in unexplained accidents since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Six of them were associated with Russia’s two largest energy companies. A few examples:

Alexander Buzakov was the head of a major Russian shipyard that specializes in building non-nuclear submarines. When he died suddenly, no cause of death given by the authorities.

Anatoly Gerashchenko, the former rector to the Moscow Aviation Institute, died in an unspecified accident last September. That same month, Lukoil chairman Ravil Maganov died after falling out of the window of a hospital in Moscow.

Another strange death around that time was that of the Russian businessman Ivan Pechorin, who was the top manager for the Corporation for the Development of the Far East and the Arctic. He was found drowned in Vladivostok near Cape Ignatyev.  Another top Lukoil manager, Alexander Subbotin, had been found dead near Moscow in May after reportedly visiting a shaman.

          There have been others. With so little information to go on, one can only speculate. Have these prominent men been murdered or driven to suicide? Have these methods of dying replaced the poisonings that Putin previously endorsed? On the other hand, what if the men were targeted not because they are opponents of Putin but because, at least officially, they are supporters?

          Rather than more guessing, I’ll devote the rest of this column to comments made by Julia Ioffe, a founding partner and Washington correspondent for the news site Puck, during an interview with Ari Shapiro on NPR:

“The West hasn't made it that easy for Russian oligarchs to peel off from Vladimir Putin. If anything, it has become even more dangerous, domestically and abroad, for Russian oligarchs to oppose Vladimir Putin, to speak out against him. And Vladimir Putin seems to be making that very clear with a string of these coincidences. And if you talk to anybody who has ever worked in intelligence or the security services in America or in other countries, they'll tell you that coincidences like this have to be very carefully planned.

“There were two men who were very high-ranking managers in the oil company Lukoil, and it was one of the only Russian companies that, in February of 2022, came out against the war while everybody else was quite silent. And then, you know, one after another, a couple of Lukoil managers turned up dead. Again, these are things that might be coincidental. These might be natural deaths. Again, we don't know for sure. But we can be absolutely sure that people in the Russian business community are taking note and being extra, extra, extra careful now in terms of what they're saying about the war, about Putin -- which they've already been careful before the war, but now I'm sure they're being doubly, triply so.”

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 18 books, including the just-published The Last Hill, with Bob Drury. To purchase a copy or to pre-order Follow Me to Hell (to be published on April 4), please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.