In the background, the war, seven dead in the spotlight, five of which linked to Gazprom, then an energy magnate and a billionaire. Deaths of managers linked to the Russian giant around which the wealth of the Kremlin revolves or oligarchs linked to the power of Moscow. Seven deaths in mysterious circumstances since late January, just before the invasion of Ukraine began. The news of the death of May 3 is the latest in chronological order: Andrei Krukowski, a manager of an alpine resort died “falling off the cliff” in Sochi. A tragedy to be filed as a dramatic accident if it weren’t for the fact that the 37-year-old was the manager of a tourist village in Gazprom.
The first suspected suicide
Gazprom: five of the seven mysterious deaths, including suicide or suicide-homicide hypotheses, are in fact linked to the name of the company. The sixty-year-old was the first to die at the end of January Leonid Shulman, a senior Gazprom executive, found dead in the bathroom of his Moscow villa in the business district. “A suicide” complete with a ticket next to the body, the Russian media reported, also recalling the man’s involvement in the company’s tax investigation. Only three weeks later, in the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine, another “suicide”, that of Alexander Tyulyakov, at the top of the Gazprom treasury, found hanged in his garage. And always at the end of February another oligarch, Mikhail Watford, an energy tycoon, was found dead in the shed of his home in the UK. Another mysterious death – but the British police would have ruled out the murder – which was followed closely by other even more heinous cases. For now branded as “homicide-suicides”, which have seen important businessmen and their families as protagonists amid hypotheses of financial crashes, depressions or stories of marital jealousy.
Family tragedies
On April 19, in a luxurious Moscow apartment, the bodies of Vladislav Avayev, former vice president of Gazprombank and former Kremlin official, his wife (possibly pregnant) and 13-year-old daughter. All killed by gunshots that the Russian media reported were fired from one of the man’s guns, found with the weapon in his hand. Family tragedy, in early March, also for Vasily Melnikovthe Russian billionaire found with his wife and two lifeless children in their home in Nizhny Novgorod.
The legitimate doubts
And then for Sergey Protosenya, former president of the Russian gas company Novotek with an estimated assets of around 400 million euros, found hanged in the garden of his villa in Spain. In the house the lifeless bodies of his wife and 18-year-old daughter, stabbed. Also in this case the version speaks of a possible homicide-suicide, a hypothesis clearly denied by the only son who survived the Lloret del Mar massacre, near Barcelona: “My father is not a murderer. I don’t know what happened that night, but I know my father didn’t hit them, ”Fedor Protosenya told British tabloids suggesting his family was murdered. And the doubt, always legitimate, also extends to other cases.
