Most of the dead are people working in Russia’s oil and gas industry. The date is April 19, 2022, the place is Lloret de Mar, Spain: Spanish police receive a phone call from Fedor Protonsenya, son of Russian oligarch. Protosenia says his family has a villa in the town and he has not been able to reach his mother by phone for hours from France. When the police arrive at the property, they find three bodies belonging to the mother, father and sister. First suspecting Fedor’s father, Sergey Protosenja, the police set out because the father strangled his mother and daughter to death, and hung himself in the garden of the villa.
However, later investigations at the crime scene raised other suspicions.
Just one day before this incident, 3 thousand kilometers away, the police encountered another horrifying incident. Russian multibillionaire Vlasdislav Avayev was found dead in his luxury Moscow home with his wife and 13-year-old daughter. Russian news agency Tass pointed out that Avayev was found with a gun in his news about the incident. Moscow police also announced that they think Avayev killed his wife and daughter with a gun, and then committed suicide.
Only a 24-hour event between these two events does not show similarity only in terms of the course of the action. Protosenja and Avayev are two multibillionaire oligarchs who also do oil and gas businesses in Russia. Protosenya was once the vice president of the Russian natural gas company Novatek, while Avayev was the vice president of Gazprombank.
Both are among the Russian oligarchs who mysteriously lost their lives this year, especially in the energy branch.
Russian oligarchs found dead one after another
In late January this year, before Russia even attacked Ukraine, it was announced that Leonid Shulman, 60, a prominent Gazprom executive, committed suicide. On February 25, Alexander Tyulyakov, who is also a Russian rich man, went to St. He was found hanged in St. Petersburg. Tyulyakov was also one of the directors of the Russian energy giant. Three days after his death, Ukrainian-born natural gas and oil tycoon Mikhael Watford was found hanging in the garage of his mansion in Surrey, England.
A suspicious death occurred in Nizhny Novgorod, one of the major cities of Russia, on March 24. The billionaire manager of medical supplies giant MedStom, Valisiy Melnikov, was found dead in his multi-million dollar home with his wife and two young sons. This event also had similarities with the story of Protosenia und Avayev.
And finally, the case of Andrey Krokovsky. Krokovsky, 37, was the manager of a ski resort called Krasnaja Polyana near Sochi. This is one of the places where Russian President Vladimir Putin also likes to invite his guests to ski. According to the news of the Russian newspaper Kommersant on May 2, Krukovsky died after falling from a rock during a ski hike.
Why were the Russian oligarchs targeted?
The mysterious death of seven very wealthy Russians in just three months leaves room for speculation. Numerous media outlets have recently reported that these deaths may not be suicides. Some even raised the possibility that Russian leader Putin or the Kremlin might have something to do with these deaths. In recent years, some assassination attempts targeting Kremlin opponents have come to the fore. One of them was directed against Kremlin opponent Alexei Navalni. Navalni was poisoned with a substance called Novichak in August 2020 at the airport of the city of Tomsk, like Sergey Skripal, a former employee of the Russian military intelligence service GRU.
Aleksander Litvinenko, one of the escaped employees of the Russian secret service, was also poisoned with radioactive Polonium in London in 2006. According to a 2017 study by the US newspaper USA Today, at least 38 oligarchs had either died or disappeared in just three years at the time.
However, what is interesting now is that no critical statements were made by the oligarchs who died this year. In addition, none of these oligarchs are on the list of business people sanctioned by the West because of the Ukraine war.
A recent report by the Warsaw Institute, a Poland-based think tank, reported that not only the Russian police, but also officials from the security unit of the Russian state gas company Gazprom, participated in the crime scene investigation into the oligarchs’ deaths. The report claimed that some senior Kremlin officials may have wanted to cover up corruption in the state-owned company.
However, there is no information confirming the accuracy of this thesis.
The Spanish police, on the other hand, continues to emphasize that the Sergey Protosenia incident may be a family drama. Son Fedor does not believe this and says in his statements to English newspapers, “My father is not a murderer”. It remains unclear whether the circumstances under which the family died can really be explained.