New Delhi: Barely two months after he abandoned his march on Moscow to demand the removal of the Russian Army’s top brass, Wagner group founder and chief Yevgeny Prigozhin is now presumed dead.
On Wednesday, Russian state media cited the country’s aviation regulator to say that Prigozhin (62) was among the seven passengers and three crew members listed on the manifest of a Saint Petersburg-bound Embraer business jet that crashed north of Moscow.
There is no confirmation yet on whether Prigozhin, once seen to be close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, was on board the aircraft when it went down in Kuzhenkino in Russia’s Tver Oblast. However, many including US President Joe Biden have suggested that they suspect the Kremlin’s involvement in the crash. Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Biden said he was “not surprised” and that “not much happens in Russia that Putin’s not behind”.
Apart from Prigozhin, numerous Putin critics and Russian oligarchs have either died under mysterious circumstances or been the targets of purported assassination attempts over the past decade.
Last year was particularly noteworthy in the wake of Russia’s military offensive in Ukraine. As ThePrint reported in December 2022, as many as eight Russians linked to key industries died in suspicious situations across a six-month period last year.
These industries included the predominantly state-owned oil and natural gas corporation Gazprom. Several individuals thought to be implicated in large-scale corruption and misappropriation of funds cases within Gazprom died in apparent freak accidents and murder-suicides.
ThePrint looks at purported attempts on the lives of critics of the Russian president over the years.
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Alexei Navalny
In 2020, Russian Opposition figure and anti-corruption lawyer Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent while staying at a hotel in Siberia. He was flown to Germany for medical treatment where he was in a coma for a week before returning to Moscow.
Laboratories certified by the Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) later confirmed that the military nerve agent used to poison Navalny had “structural characteristics” similar to the Novichok family — a group of nerve agents developed in the Soviet Union and Russia. While Navalny and his supporters accused the Kremlin of orchestrating the attack, Moscow denied any involvement.
Immediately upon his return to Moscow in 2021, Navalny was arrested and is now serving a sentence totalling 11 1/2 years on charges he has termed “politically motivated”. Earlier this month, a Russian court sentenced him to 19 more years on charges of extremism.
Vladimir Kara-Murza
Vladimir Kara-Murza, another Russian Opposition figure, was allegedly poisoned in 2015, and again in 2017.
Roughly a month after Kara-Murza met American leaders on Capitol Hill and urged them to increase economic sanctions against the Kremlin in 2015, he was allegedly poisoned and spent a week in a coma.
Two years later, in 2017, he was again hospitalised with the same symptoms as before. He was put in a medically induced coma and was on life support. After being hospitalised for two weeks, he went abroad for treatment. Over the past year, Kara-Murza has emerged as a vocal critic of Putin and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He was pronounced guilty of treason and jailed for 25 years in April this year.
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Sergei & Yulia Skripal
On 4 March 2018, the city of Salisbury in southern England witnessed a purported assassination attempt as former Russian military officer and longtime British intelligence double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned, reportedly using Novichok. Both survived.
With the British government holding the Russian state responsible for the poisoning and Moscow denying it and accusing the UK, the two countries engaged in a standoff as 342 diplomats were sent back to their home countries. Russia expelled 189 foreign diplomats, while the US, the UK and other predominantly EU and NATO member nations expelled 140 Russian diplomats.
Similarly, Ukraine had sent back 13 Russian diplomats at the time.
In September that year, the UK’s Scotland Yard and Crown Prosecution Service named two Russian individuals, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, as suspects in the case with alleged links to Russia’s military intelligence service, known colloquially by its erstwhile Soviet acronym, GRU.
The two men branded suspects were interviewed by state-controlled media network Russia Today later that month, and labelled their visit as purely coincidental, claiming they were tourists visiting the Salisbury Cathedral.
Boris Berezovsky
One of several oligarchs who benefited from Boris Yeltsin’s policy of privatising state assets, Berezovsky was a significant Putin supporter in the 1990s but turned into a critic following the 2000 presidential election, citing proposed constitutional reforms that would give the Kremlin extensive powers over provincial governors.
Berezovsky went into exile following his resignation from the Russian parliament, or State Duma, and was granted asylum in the UK in 2003. For the rest of his life, Berezovsky repeatedly delivered public rebukes of Putin, particularly in UK media, and even launched a civil case against oligarch and former Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich, a fellow 1990s-era beneficiary of the Yeltsin privatisation policy and a longtime suspected Putin ally.
Berezovsky was found dead “with a ligature around his neck” at his home in Ascot, Berkshire in early 2013, over six months after losing his case against Abramovich. While a post-mortem examination found his death to be consistent with suicide by hanging, the coroner probing his death in 2014 said he could not prove beyond reasonable doubt that Berezovsky took his own life.
Alexander Litvinenko
By far the earliest and most high-profile death of a Putin dissenter was that of former Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officer Alexander Litvinenko, who had defected to the UK at the turn of the century after accusing his superiors of ordering an assassination attempt against Berezovsky, and become a vocal critic of the actions of the Russian and Soviet intelligence services, including those linked to his then colleague Vladimir Putin.
When he was with the FSB, Litvinenko had worked on counter-terrorism and tackling organised crime. After the defection, he aided the British intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, until he was poisoned with Polonium-210, a toxic radioactive isotope, in November 2006, and died from the poisoning later that month.
A public inquiry into his death did not occur until 2015. The findings of the inquiry alleged in 2016 that two Russian suspects, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, “deliberately” poisoned him and were likely acting under the direction of the FSB and Putin himself.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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