After the chairman of Russia’s largest private oil company died in what Russian news agencies said was an accidental fall from a hospital window, questions have been raised again about whether suspicious deaths among Russian oligarchs and critics of President Vladimir Putin have become too common. to be completely random, reports Euronews.

A statement from his company, Lukoil, initially said that Ravil Maganov “died after a serious illness” on Thursday, but gave no further details.

Russian media later reported that his lifeless body was found on the grounds of Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital, where Russian businessmen and politicians are often treated.

Putin went to the same hospital on Friday to lay flowers at the coffin of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday.

According to Russian mass media, Maganov fell from the window of the sixth floor. Some sources claimed he tripped and fell while smoking, saying a pack of cigarettes was found near the window. The RBC news site also reported that the police are investigating the possibility of suicide.

Lukoil was one of the few Russian companies to publicly call for an end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, calling for an “immediate end to the armed conflict” in March.

By the way, Maganov was not the first Lukoil official to die under suspicious circumstances after the start of the Kremlin’s large-scale aggression against its western neighbor at the end of February.

Former manager Oleksandr Subbotin was found dead in the basement of a residence in the suburbs of Moscow in May.

Russian media reported that the house belonged to a self-proclaimed healer, Shaman Magua, who practiced purification rituals.

Magua testified that Subbotin came to his home under the influence of alcohol and drugs and asked a healer, whose real name is Oleksiy Pindurin, to conduct a ritual of healing from hangover symptoms.

According to preliminary investigation data, Subbotin died of heart failure.

However, it was Ravil Maganov’s death that attracted media attention, being the latest in a series of accidental self-immolations and other suspicious deaths of those who either benefited from good relations with Putin or were under his rib. – or both.

Anti-war oligarchs die under strange circumstances

At least six other Russian oligarchs have died under strange circumstances since the conflict in Ukraine began. All the dead are united by close ties with the Kremlin, huge fortunes, a connection with Russian gas and an anti-war stance on Ukraine.

This has raised the suspicions of international investigators, who are beginning to believe that the deaths may actually have been staged suicides or murders because of their stance on the Kremlin’s aggression against Ukraine or their links to corruption at the Russian gas company Gazprom.

It all started in St. Petersburg on the eve of the war.

Literally a month before the start of the conflict in Ukraine, the executive director of the Gazprom gas company was found dead in his cottage near St. Petersburg.

60-year-old Leonid Shulman was found in the bathroom of the house with cut wrists, local media reported with reference to sources.

According to police, a note was found near his body in which he described his suffering after a leg injury, which Gazprom claimed prompted him to take a vacation.

The version was called into question after the Warsaw Institute, a Polish think tank on international affairs, said that Shulman, who headed the transport service of Gazprom Invest, was involved in a possible corruption case at the Russian giant Gazprom.

The morning after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Oleksandr Tyulakov, 65, Gazprom’s security director, died at his home in the same village as Shulman. According to the Russian edition “Novaya Gazeta”, he was found hanged in the garage.

The same publication, citing an unnamed source in law enforcement agencies, reported that Gazprom’s own security service arrived at the scene of his death at the same time as the police and is also investigating the death.

One of the two deaths that occurred abroad was that of Michael Watford, who lived with his family in Great Britain. On February 28, the 66-year-old Ukrainian-born oil and gas tycoon, who also built a property empire in London, was found dead at his home in Surrey.

Watford’s cause of death was determined to be death by hanging, and his wife and children, who were home at the time, were unharmed. British authorities treated Watford’s death as suspicious.

It was later revealed that Watford, commonly known as Misha, had changed his surname to Tolstoshey after moving to the UK in the early 2000s.

Is the number of “suicides” among Putin-friendly oligarchs suddenly increasing?

In March, the bodies of Russian billionaire Vasyl Melnikov and members of his family were found in his luxury apartment in Nizhny Novgorod, a city in western Russia.

Melnikov became rich by working in one of the medical companies affected by Western sanctions.

According to the Russian publication Kommersant, Melnikov, his 41-year-old wife and two minor children, aged 10 and 4, died from stab wounds. The weapon would have been found at the scene of the crime.

The publication reported that the oligarch killed his family before committing suicide, although neighbors and relatives disagreed with the official version.

Other media reported that Melnikov’s company, which imports medical equipment to Russia, was on the verge of bankruptcy due to Western sanctions imposed in response to the war in Ukraine.

The latest case occurred in Spain, specifically in Lloret de Mar, where on April 19 Russian oligarch Sergei Protosenia, 55, was found dead along with two other family members.

The former head of Novatek, whose personal fortune is 400 million euros, was found hanged with his wife and daughter, who were stabbed to death in the family villa.

What the police initially qualified as a double murder followed by suicide of Protosenia, was later categorically denied by his son.

Several friends of the family also said that Protosenia was actually the third victim of the “staged suicide” and that the oligarch would not have been capable of killing his family.

Catalan police are still actively investigating the case.

Literally a day before the death of Protosenia and his family, the body of Russian oligarch Vladyslav Avayev, as well as the bodies of his wife and 13-year-old daughter, were found in his Moscow apartment. His 26-year-old daughter Anastasia discovered the crime scene.

Russia’s state-run TASS news agency, citing a source close to law enforcement, said preliminary data indicated that Avayev, a former adviser to Putin and ex-deputy chairman of Gazprombank, killed his wife and daughter before committing suicide.

A gun was found in the hands of the oligarch, and the apartment was locked from the inside.

Gazprombank is the third largest bank in Russia and is affiliated with Gazprom, the world’s largest public gas company.

Autodefenestrations. The deaths of Russians who died after allegedly jumping out of windows remain the most suspicious

The death of Maganov on September 1 also repeats the pattern of deaths of prominent Russians by falling out of windows.

In October 2021, a Russian diplomat was found dead after falling from a window of the Russian embassy in Berlin, Der Spiegel reported.

The unidentified man was an embassy secretary, but German intelligence sources told the newspaper they suspected he was an undercover Russian FSB operative.

The Bellingcat investigative service said it used open source data to identify the man as Kirill Zhalo, the son of General Oleksiy Zhalo, the deputy director of the FSB responsible for managing domestic political threats to the Kremlin.

The same year, in December, Yehor Prosvirnin, editor-in-chief of “Sputnik” and “Pogrom” died after falling from the window of a residential building in Moscow.

Prosvirnin’s naked body was found next to a knife and a gas canister after screams came from his apartment, local media reported.

Prosvirnin, a right-wing activist, initially supported Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, but later became a vocal critic of Putin, predicting civil war in Russia and the collapse of the Russian Federation.

On August 14, Dan Rapoport, a banker and outspoken critic of Putin who had just left Ukraine after the Russian invasion, was found dead outside a luxury apartment building in Washington.

Police say they are not treating Rapoport’s death as suspicious, according to Politico in Washington, but the case remains under investigation.

Rapoport reportedly made his fortune while in Moscow before falling out of favor with the Kremlin, largely thanks to his support of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

In 2017, Serhiy Tkachenko, Rapoport’s business partner at the time, also died in his Moscow apartment.

During the COVID-19 pandemic in Russia, at least four medical workers fell from windows, with only one surviving despite serious injuries.

At least three incidents in which doctors were allegedly thrown from hospital windows occurred in a two-week period between April and May 2020, with media reporting that they were protesting working conditions during the country’s worst wave of infections before the incidents.

In December 2020, a leading scientist developing a new vaccine against COVID-19, Oleksandr Kagansky, was found dead after falling from the window of his St. Petersburg apartment.

According to Russian publications, the police claimed that Kagansky stabbed himself and then jumped out of the window