AT least ten rich Russian oligarchs and critics of Vladimir Putin have been found dead in mysterious circumstances this year.
Since Putin unleashed his troops into Ukraine in February, it is feared a number of wealthy businessmen and former cronies have been murdered.
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Some of those who have died had spoken out against the tyrant.
Just days ago, wealthy Russian MP Pavel Antov was found dead after an unexplained fall in India.
The sausage multi-millionaire had criticised Putin‘s war in Ukraine.
In June Antov slammed missile strikes on Ukraine, saying: “A girl has been pulled out from under the rubble, the girl’s father appears to have died.
“The mother is being pulled out with a crane — she is trapped under a slab.
“To tell the truth, it is extremely difficult to call this anything other than terror.”
Antov, from the main pro-Putin party United Russia, died on Christmas Eve on a trip to mark his 66th birthday.
Indian media reported that the sausage tycoon jumped from the roof but Russia’s consul general Alexei Idamkin insisted he fell from a window.
Married mogul Antov, listed as Russia’s richest elected politician in 2019, was found in a pool of blood in Rayagada, Odisha state.
He is the latest of the Kremlin’s inner circle to be found dead in suspicious circumstances amid claims there were similarities in some of their deaths.
In September, Pavel Pchelnikov, 52, was found shot on the balcony of his apartment in Moscow.
Russian media claimed Pchelnikov, an executive at the state rail company Russian, killed himself.
But just weeks earlier he had shared sweet pictures from a family holiday, making his sudden death seemingly at his own hands all the more shocking.
Russian Railways has reportedly come under pressure from the Kremlin recently over its failure to stop Ukrainian hackers from shutting down its network.
This has led to critical delays in supplies reaching the front line.
The company was slapped with EU sanctions on February 27 in the early days of the war. The UK followed suit in sanctioning the firm on March 24.
The firm previously appeared to criticise the war in Ukraine.
Just the week before Pchelnikov’s death, ex-Putin ally Anatoly Gerashchenko died after reportedly falling down a series of flights of stairs.
According to reports, the 73-year-old aviation chief fell down “several flights of stairs” at the Moscow Aviation Institute (MAI) and died at the scene.
Gerashchenko is rumoured to have fallen out with Putin’s inner circle, forcing him from his position as rector seven years ago.
Also in September, Ivan Pechorin – Putin’s point man for developing Russia’s vast Arctic resources – mysteriously “fell overboard” from a boat.
The 39-year-old – Putin‘s point man for developing Russia‘s vast Arctic resources – reportedly plunged from a boat in waters close to Russky Island.
It came just weeks after oil boss Ravil Maganov died after “falling from a hospital window”.
The 64-year-old, head of Russian oil giant Lukoil, reportedly died after falling from a sixth-floor window at Moscow’s Central Clinic Hospital.
Lukoil, which had earlier criticised the war in Ukraine, confirmed Maganov’s death, but bizarrely put it down instead to some unknown illness.
On February 25 – the day after Putin ordered his troops into Ukraine – the body of Alexander Tyulakov, a senior Gazprom financial and security official at the deputy general director level – was discovered dead by his lover.
The 61-year-old’s neck was in a noose in his £500,000 home.
Just three weeks prior – in the same elite gated housing development in the Leningrad region – Leonid Shulman, head of transport at Gazprom Invest, was found dead.
The 60-year-old was discovered with multiple stab wounds in a pool of blood on his bathroom floor.
Meanwhile, Russian oligarch Vladislav Avayev, 51, an ex-vice-president of Gazprombank and former Kremlin official, was found shot dead in his elite Moscow penthouse.
And days later, another oligarch Sergey Protosenya, 55, was found dead by hanging in Spain.
Protosenya was a former deputy chairman of Novotek, a company closely linked to the Kremlin.
And in March, the body of Russian billionaire Vasily Melnikov, his wife and their two sons were found in his luxury apartment with stab wounds in the city of Nizhny Novgorod.
The family had been stabbed to death and police investigators believed Melnikov killed his family before taking his own life.
However, neighbours and relatives came forward and said they struggle to believe Melnikov could have done something so evil.
The businessman had been an executive at medical firm MedStom, which had suffered greatly as a result of economic sanctions placed on Russia in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, according to Ukrainian publication Glavred.
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Katie Davis
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