Alexei Navalny's body has now been found and it shows signs of being held down while suffering convulsions. Navalny's body was reportedly found with signs of bruising, as he was allegedly held down while suffering a seizure. There is no evidence or apparent cause of any seizures. however. His body is currently being held at a hospital morgue, and being withheld from his family.
Navalny is just the latest in a long line of mysterious murders and deaths in Russia. Many of the critics of the Russian regime investigated crimes of Russia's intelligence services, while others criticized Putin's wars in Chechnya, Georgia and Ukraine. The methods employed ranged from poisoning and shooting to plane crashes.
One of the first to die was Sergei Yushenkov, a liberal politician and ally of exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky. He was shot dead in 2003. Yushenkov, a critic of the Kremlin, investigated the Federal Security Service's (FSB) alleged involvement in staging the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis.
Yushenkov was also a member of an independent commission that investigated allegations of the FSB's involvement in the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings, which killed 307 people.
Another member of the commission, Novaya Gazeta journalist Yury Shchekochikhin, died after being poisoned in 2003. According to an analysis by London specialists, Shchekochikhin was poisoned with thallium.
Investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was also a vehement critic of the FSB, Putin's regime and his war in Chechnya. She survived a poisoning attempt in 2004. But two years later, Politkovskaya was shot dead in her building's elevator on Putin's birthday.
Meanwhile, former Russian intelligence officer Litvinenko, who accused Putin of orchestrating the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings, was poisoned in the U.K. in 2006 with polonium-210, a radioactive element. The British police charged Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB officer and current pro-Kremlin lawmaker, and businessman Dmitry Kovtun with murdering Litvinenko. In 2016, a British court concluded that Putin and Nikolai Patrushev, the former head of the FSB, “probably” ordered Litvinenko’s assassination.
Another opponent of the Kremlin, Sergei Magnitsky, was arrested on trumped-up charges in 2008 after exposing corruption by Russian government officials. He died in prison in 2009 after being beaten up and developing multiple diseases. Magnitsky's death was not investigated, and Russian authorities convicted him in a posthumous trial on tax evasion charges.
A similar fate befell Boris Berezovsky, a Russian oligarch who had helped Putin to come to power but had later fallen out with him. He was found hanged in his bathroom in the U.K. in 2013.
One of the most prominent enemies of Putin was Boris Nemtsov. He co-led the opposition to Russia's aggression against Ukraine, which began in 2014. Nemtsov was shot dead in front of the Kremlin in 2015.
Yet another critic of the Russian dictator, Denis Voronenkov, was shot dead in Kyiv in 2017. Voronenkov had been a Russian pro-Putin lawmaker who had switched sides and fled to Ukraine.
Ravil Maganov, the chairman of the board of Russia’s second largest oil producer Lukoil, met a tragic end six months after he openly criticized the war in Ukraine. In September 2022, 67-year-old Maganov died after falling from a sixth-floor window at the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow. Russian state news agency Tass claimed his death was a suicide.
Leonid Shulman, the head of transport at Gazprom Invest was found dead in his cottage in the village of Leninsky near Leningrad in January 2022. Russian state media reported that a suicide note was found at the scene and that the investigators were investigating the death as a suicide. Just a month after that, another top executive at Gazprom, Alexander Tyulakov, was found dead from suicide in the same village. Less than a month later, another Russian businessman, Vasily Melnikov, was found stabbed to death alongside his family in Nizhny Novgoro. The following month, Vladislav Avayev, the former vice-president of Gazprombank, was found dead with his wife and daughter in his Moscow apartment. Russian authorities report that it was a case of murder-suicide. And just days after that incident, Sergey Protosenya, former executive at the gas producer Novatek (which is partially owned by Gazprom) was found dead (along with his wife and daughter) at his home north of Barcelona.
That's right-- those fleeing Russia are not safe either.
Boris Berezovsky became a billionaire after he gained control of
Channel One, the main Russian TV channel. The Russian Deputy Prosecutor General eventually demanded that
he come in for
questioning. Berezovsky instead moved to the UK, where he was found dead in 2013. While his
death was initially deemed to have been a suicide by hanging, there was no evidence that he struggled in the act of hanging-- the circumstances of his death remain undetermined..
In 2018, former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia survived after being poisoned in the U.K. with Novichok, a nerve agent produced by the Russian government. Dawn Sturgess, a British citizen, accidentally came into contact with the poison and died as a result. The British authorities identified Russian military intelligence agents using the passports of Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Bashirov as suspects in the murder case. Bellingcat, an open-source intelligence outfit, later identified Petrov and Bashirov to be FSB agents Alexander Mishkin and Anatoliy Chepiga.
Another 2018 murder has been linked to the Wagner mercenary group, which at the time was acting as Putin's private army. Journalist Orkhan Dzhemal, film director Alexander Rastorguyev and cameraman Kirill Radchenko were killed in the Central African Republic while investigating Wagner mercenaries there.
Two other critics of Putin – columnist Yulia Latynina and activist Pyotr Verzilov – survived poisoning attempts in 2017-2018.
Several critics of Putin living abroad also exhibited signs of poisoning in 2021-2023, according to independent Russian publications Agentsvto and Meduza. These include Natalia Arno, head of the Free Russia Foundation, journalist Yelena Kostyuchenko, and John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.
During Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022-2023, more than a dozen Russian officials, executives, and businessmen died in mysterious circumstances, with some falling out of a window, off a staircase, or from a boat.
One of the latest deaths was that of Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Kremlin ally who became an opponent of Putin's regime in 2023. In June 2023 Prigozhin's Wagner mercenary group launched a rebellion and marched on Moscow. Short of reaching the capital, Prigozhin concluded a deal with Putin and halted the mutiny. However, in August 2023 a private jet with Prigozhin and six Wagner employees on board crashed not far from Moscow. The likely cause was a bomb onboard or some other form of sabotage. But the Conflict Intelligence Team, an open-source intelligence outfit, believes the plane was most likely shot down by a surface-to-air missile, based on the contrail and sounds of explosions recorded by eyewitnesses.
Human rights lawyers and opposition politicians say that now the lives of many political prisoners are also at risk. One of them is Vladimir Kara-Murza, who survived two poisoning attempts in 2015 and 2017. An FSB poisoning team followed him during the assassination attempts, according to an investigation by Bellingcat, the Insider and Der Spiegel. In April 2023, Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years in jail on charges of libel against the Russian army. Kara-Murza's health is deteriorating as a result of harsh prison conditions and inadequate medical treatment, according to his lawyers. They say he is suffering from polyneuropathy, which developed as a result of the poisoning attempts.
Another political prisoner at risk is liberal politician Ilya Yashin. In 2022 he was sentenced to 8.5 years in jail on charges of "spreading fake information about the Russian army" – a popular accusation used in Russia to prosecute those opposing Russia's war against Ukraine.
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