At least 11 of Putin’s biggest critics mysteriously died before Alexei Navalny
Prominent Putin opposer Alexei Navalny has become the latest in a string of deaths of critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
World leaders and activists were not shy today in blaming the reported death of imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Putin and his government. US President Joe Biden said Washington does not know exactly what happened, "but there is no doubt that the death of Navalny was a consequence of something Putin and his thugs did."
The inevitable but shocking news of his death was announced by the country’s prison service without giving a cause. It then soon flooded Russian Telegram news channels and was confirmed in a curt announcement by prison authorities, prompting the United Nations Human Rights Office to call for an independent investigation.
Alexei Navalny in 2018 (AFP via Getty Images)Over his more than two decades at the top of the Kremlin, several of warmonger Putin's opponents from political critics to turncoat spies and investigative journalists have been killed or assaulted in a variety of ways. Those close to the victims and the few survivors have blamed Russian authorities, but the Kremlin has routinely denied involvement.
There also have been reports of prominent Russian executives dying under mysterious circumstances, including falling from windows, although whether they were deliberate killings or suicides is sometimes difficult to determine.
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Below are some prominent cases of documented killings or attempted killings, but there are many more too.
Yevgeny Prigozhin
A portrait of Yevgeny Prigozhin at a memorial for his death (MAXIM SHIPENKOV/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)Two months to the day after Yevgeny Prigozhin launched an armed rebellion that Putin labelled "a stab in the back" and "treason", a plane he was travelling in crashed causing him and all other passengers to die. The crash was intentionally caused by an explosion, according to US and Western officials.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to comment. One said the explosion fell in line with Putin’s "long history of trying to silence his critics." While not outwardly critical of Putin himself, Prigozhin slammed the Russian military leadership and questioned the motives for going to war in Ukraine.
Alexander Litvinenko
Alexander Litvinenko in his hospital bed following poisoning (PA)In 2006, Russian defector and British citizen Alexander Litvinenko, a former agent for the KGB and its post-Soviet successor agency, the FSB, became violently ill in London after drinking tea laced with radioactive polonium-210. A now famous photo of Litvinenko in hospital showed him gaunt and emaciated before he died three weeks later.
A British inquiry found that Russian agents had killed Litvinenko, likely with Putin’s approval, but the Kremlin, of course, denied any involvement. His body was so radioactive that his post-mortem was "one of the most dangerous" ever undertaken and the isotope that killed him was so rare it would not have been discovered by a normal autopsy, Nathaniel Cary, who conducted the post-mortem examination, told the inquiry
Litvinenko had been investigating the shooting death of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya as well as the Russian intelligence service’s alleged links to organised crime. Before dying, Litvinenko told journalists the FSB was still operating a poisons laboratory dating from the Soviet era.
Anna Politkovskaya
Anna Politkovskaya in Germany on a book tour for her book titled "In Putin's Russia" (AFP/Getty Images)On Putin's birthday, October 7 2006, journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot and killed in the lift of her Moscow apartment building. She won international acclaim for her reporting on human rights abuses in Chechnya for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta. The gunman, from Chechnya, was convicted of the killing and sentenced to 20 years in prison and four other Chechens were given shorter prison terms for their involvement in the murder.
Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia
Sergei Skripal with his daughter Yulia (EAST2WEST NEWS)In a case that shocked Britain and led to a television drama being made on the ordeal, former Russian intelligence officer, Sergei Skripal, was poisoned in 2018. He and his adult daughter Yulia fell ill in the city of Salisbury and spent weeks in critical condition. They survived, but the attack later claimed the life of Dawn Sturgess, who lived in Salisbury and had no connection with the Skripals, when she was exposed to the nerve agent. It also left a man and a police officer seriously ill.
Authorities said they both were poisoned with the military-grade nerve agent Novichok. Britain blamed Russian intelligence, but Moscow denied any role. Putin called Skripal, a former MI6 informant, a "scumbag" of no interest to the Kremlin because he was tried in Russia and exchanged in a spy swap in 2010.
Boris Nemtsov
Former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov (Getty Images)The highest-profile killing of a political opponent, before Navalny, in recent years was that of Boris Nemtsov. Former deputy Prime Minister under Boris Yeltsin, Nemtsov was a popular politician and harsh critic of Putin. He had been working on a report examining Russia's role in the conflict in Ukraine in 2015 when he was gunned down.
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Aged 55, he was shot dead on a bridge just metres from the Kremlin as he walked home at night with his girlfriend. Five men were found guilty of organising and carrying out the contract killing. Zaur Dadayev, an officer in Chechen leader and Putin ally Ramzan Kadyrov's security forces, was found guilty of firing the fatal shots.
A joint investigation by journalists from the Insider, the BBC and Bellingcat revealed that Nemtsov had been shadowed by FSB agents for almost a year before he was assassinated on a bridge. It also showed that some of the same agents were involved in the poisonings of other top Kremlin critics.
Vladimir Kara-Murza
Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza (AFP via Getty Images)Prominent opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza survived what he believes were attempts to poison him in 2015 and 2017. He nearly died from kidney failure in the first instance and suspects poisoning but no cause was determined. He was hospitalised with a similar illness in 2017 and put into a medically induced coma. His wife said doctors confirmed he was poisoned.
Kara-Murza survived, and his lawyer says police have refused to investigate. Last year, he was convicted of treason and sentenced to 25 years in prison. In January he was moved to a prison in Siberia and placed in solitary confinement, similar to one where Navalny died, over an alleged minor infraction.
Yuri Shchekochikhin
Yuri Shchekochikhin (NY Daily News via Getty Images)Anna Politkovskaya's colleague Yuri Shchekochikhin, another Novaya Gazeta reporter, died of a sudden and violent illness in 2003. Shchekochikhin was investigating corrupt business deals and the possible role of Russian security services in the 1999 apartment house bombings blamed on Chechen insurgents. His colleagues insisted that he was poisoned and accused the authorities of deliberately hindering the investigation.
Boris Berezovsky
Russian oligarch and businessman Boris Berezovsky (Getty Images)Former billionaire Boris Berezovsky had been living in exile in Britain since 2000 when he was found dead in 2013. One of the country's most powerful men, the self-made Russian oligarch helped Putin rise to power before they fell out. He accused the Kremin of being behind Litvinenko's death.
James Nixey, head of Chatham House's Russia programme, previously described him as "the most virulently anti-Kremlin, anti-Putin of the oligarchs". He was found dead in his bath in 2013, in a locked bathroom with a noose around his neck. At an inquest into his death, a coroner returned an open verdict.
Natalia Estemirova
Natalia Estemirova (Reuters)An award-winning human rights campaigner who had collected evidence of abuses in Chechnya since the start of the second war there in 1999, Estemirova was abducted outside her home, in the Chechen capital, Grozny, and shot in 2009.
Several hours later her body was found in an area of woodland, with gunshot wounds to the head and chest. Then-president Dmitry Medvedev rejected claims that Chechnyan leader Ramzan Kadyrov was responsible and suggested the killing had been carried out to discredit the Kremlin. She had previously worked with Anna Politkovskaya.
Ravil Maganov
Lukoil vice-president Ravil Maganov (R), pictured with Vladimir Putin (L) (Kremlin/EAST2WEST NEWS)The chairman of the board of Russia's second-largest oil producer Lukoil, Ravil Maganov had openly criticised the war in Ukraine and later that year died. In a statement in March 2022, the board called for the "soonest termination of the armed conflict" and expressed "sincere empathy for all victims".
In September of that year, the 67-year-old then died after apparently falling from a sixth-floor window at the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow. His death was the latest of several Russian energy tycoons killed in suspicious circumstances that year as the war in Ukraine continued to rumble on.
Top oil magnate Yury Voronov, a Russian businessman with connections to Russian oil company Gazprom, was found dead after reportedly being shot in the head back in June. His body was discovered in the swimming pool of a luxury property near St Petersburg and what happened is still unknown.
His death came after Vladislav Avayev, a former Gazprombank vice-president, and Sergey Protosenya, a top manager at Russia’s Novotek energy giant, were both reported to have committed apparent murder-suicides in April.
Denis Voronenkov
Denis Voronenkov (Anna Isakova/TASS)Former Russian MP Denis Voronenkov, who had fled to Ukraine, was shot dead in Kyiv just before he was about to testify against the pro-Putin Prime Minister of Russia
He was previously a member of the communist faction in the lower house of the Russian parliament. Ukraine's then-president Petro Poroshenko described his killing as an "act of state terrorism" by Russia which was rejected by the Kremlin.
In an interview, Voronenkov likened modern-day Russia to Nazi Germany and said its annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 was "illegal". He said that he and his wife, along with their young son Ivan had left Russia because he was being followed by the security services. President Poroshenko, the Ukrainian President of the time, accused Russia of carrying out the murder to silence a man who was "forced to leave [Moscow] for political reasons".
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