Criticism of Putin and sudden death: Yevgeny Prigozhin would not be the first

This article was last updated on August 24, 2023

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Criticism of Putin and sudden death: Prigozhin would not be the first

Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was reportedly killed in a plane crash on Wednesday. He is certainly not the first Russian to (nearly) die in a suspicious manner after a conflict with President Vladimir Putin.

Alexei Navalny

Russian opposition leader Navalny has been Putin’s most famous opponent for years. Navalny exposed, among other things, the large-scale corruption in Russia. For now he is still alive, but that may be called a small miracle.

Navalny was poisoned with the nerve agent novichok by the Russian security service FSB in August 2020 during a flight to Moscow. That almost cost him his life, but he survived and recuperated in a hospital in Berlin. It is widely believed that Putin personally ordered the attack.

In early 2021, Navalny returned to Russia, where he was immediately arrested. He is now serving an increasingly longer prison sentence after several mock trials. It is almost impossible that he will ever be released.

Sergey Skripal

Skripal was a double agent for Russia and the United Kingdom in the 1990s. At the end of 2004 he was arrested by the FSB and convicted of high treason.

He escaped to England. There he and his daughter Yulia were poisoned there in March 2018 with the same nerve gas as Navalny: novichok. The British government accused the Russian government under Putin of being behind the assassination attempt. Putin has always denied that.

Skripal and his daughter survived the poisoning, but fled once more. Last year it was announced that they are now living in New Zealand under a different name.

Alexander Litvinenko

Litvinenko was an agent of the FSB and its predecessor, the KGB. He revealed in 1998 that he had to kill businessman Boris Berezovsky. Berezovsky then had a row with rising star Putin.

Litvinenko later fled to England and passed on a lot of information about, among other things, the relationship between Putin and the Russian mafia. He also publicly criticized Putin and his government.

In November 2006, he was poisoned with the radioactive substance polonium-210. Three weeks later he died. In a declaration shortly before his death, he blamed Putin.

Russians are falling out of windows in droves

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, there have been suspiciously many cases of prominent Russians falling from windows of high-rise buildings. This often happened after they had expressed (light) criticism of the war or had angered Putin in some other way.

Ravil Maganov, for example, died last September when he fell from the window of a hospital in Moscow. Maganov was the chairman of the largest Russian oil company that is not wholly owned by the state. That company, Lukoil, had been critical of the war in Ukraine for months.

The same happened to Pavel Antov, a Russian politician and businessman. He fell out of a hotel window in India at the end of 2022. Shortly before, the sausage wholesaler had criticized Putin’s actions.

Last June, Kristina Balkova fell from the window of her Moscow apartment. She was the vice president of a Russian bank, which according to Putin had “suspicious foreign investors” as customers, which he had forbidden.

The list is much longer. Wikipedia has an entire page dedicated to suspicious deaths of Russian businessmen since 2022. According to the Russian government’s narrative, almost all of them committed suicide, became “suddenly” sick, or fell out of a window or down a flight of stairs.

The American magazine The Atlantic coined a term for it at the end of 2022: ‘Sudden Russian Death Syndrome’.

Yevgeny Prigozhin strongly criticized Kremlin

Wagner leader Prigozhin is said to have been on the plane that crashed north of Moscow on Wednesday under suspicious circumstances.

Prigozhin and his mercenary army became notorious worldwide for their brutal acts in Ukraine. Prigozhin strongly criticized the Kremlin’s handling of the war. Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu was his favorite target.

Last June, the Wagner mercenary army briefly revolted against Russia. Prigozhin and his men even seemed on their way to storm Moscow. Never before have Russians turned so openly against Putin and his government. In the end, Putin managed to make a deal with Prigozhin and his mercenaries.

It is not yet fully certain whether Prigozhin really died in the accident, let alone whether Putin was behind it. But as US President Joe Biden put it, “Little is happening in Russia that Putin isn’t behind.”