Mystery after two Putin cronies are found dead on same day
On the same day that a Russian minister was found dead hours after being sacked, a second man in the same department dropped dead.
Deputy head of Russia’s Federal Road Agency’s Property Management Department, Andrey Korneichuk, reportedly stood up and collapsed in his office.
Paramedics declared the 42-year-old dead at the scene, with initial reports finding his heart just ‘stopped’.
The sudden death has raised eyebrows, given that his boss, Transportation Minister Roman Starovoit, was found dead with gunshot wounds on the same day.
There’s no indication the incidents are linked, but the timing of the men’s sudden deaths is hard to ignore, given the high level of Russian officials who seem to die after being dismissed from their jobs or speaking out against President Vladimir Putin.
Starovoit, 53, was sacked after barely a year as transport minister without an official explanation.
Russia’s Investigative Committee, the top criminal investigation agency, said the body of Starovoit was found with a gunshot wound in Odintsovo, a neighbourhood just west of the capital where many members of Russia’s elite live.
He’s the most recent Russian politician close to Putin to die in mysterious circumstances.
Sergei Markov, director of Russia’s Institute of Political Studies, shocked the country when he went on the record and suggested Starovoit was murdered.
‘The Russian elite was shocked by the suicide of Roman Starovoit, the former Minister of Transport, just a few hours after Putin removed him,’ he said.
‘But it seems to me that those who eliminated him – that is, those against whom he could have testified after his arrest – are trying to hide his real murder by using the suicide version.’
Starovoit was last seen in public on Sunday morning when an official video from the ministry’s situation room featured him receiving reports from officials.
The death came days after an oil tycoon who had links to the KGB became the latest high-profile figure to mysteriously fall from a high building in Russia.
Transneft vice-president Andrey Badalov, 62, is said to have fallen from the penthouse of the luxury high rise where in lived in Moscow.
‘Badalov’s body was found under the windows of an [apartment building] on Rublevskoye Highway,’ a source told TASS.
Transneft is Russia’s state oil pipeline monopoly which is run by former KGB spy, Nikolai Tokarev, 74, who served with Vladimir Putin, 72, in Germany in the Cold War.
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