67-year old Ravil Maganov, vice-president of Russia’s second-largest oil company Lukoil, reportedly died on Thursday morning after falling out of a sixth-floor hospital window in Moscow.
Maganov, an outspoken critic of Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine, was the fourth Russian energy tycoon to die under mysterious circumstances since the invasion began.
Various sources in Russia provided conflicting accounts of Maganov’s death. Russia’s state-run Tass news agency quoted sources who claimed he committed suicide by leaping from the sixth floor of the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow, a facility informally known as the “Kremlin Clinic” because it caters to the Russian elite. It is the same hospital where former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev died on Tuesday.
According to Tass, Maganov was receiving treatment at the hospital after a heart attack and was taking antidepressant drugs.
Lukoil, on the other hand, issued a press release that said its vice president “passed away following a severe illness.” The hospital refused to officially comment on the cause of death and Moscow police refused to comment on their investigation of the incident.
Two people who claimed to know Maganov personally told Reuters they found it “highly unlikely” that he would commit suicide.
Lukoil made an unusual break from the Putin regime in March, issuing a statement that called for the “soonest termination of the armed conflict” and expressing “sincere empathy for all victims.”
Ukrainian artillerymen in the military assembly center check the weapons and special equipment to make them ready before they go to their duties at the frontline in Kherson, Ukraine on July 15, 2022. (Metin Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
“We strongly support a lasting ceasefire and a settlement of problems through serious negotiations and diplomacy,” the company said.
A view of Central Clinical Hospital where the chairman of Russian energy giant Lukoil, Ravil Maganov, was being treated for an illness and died of his injuries after he fell out of a window of the sixth floor in Moscow, Russia on September 01, 2022. (Evgenii Bugubaev/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
In May, former Lukoil manager Alexander Subbotin was found dead in the basement of a house in suburban Moscow. The official cause of death was that a witch accidentally killed him with a poison toad.
Two other Russian energy oligarchs, Sergei Protosenya and Vladislav Avayev, died under murky circumstances in April. Protesenya supposedly murdered his wife and 18-year-old daughter with an axe and then hanged himself in a luxury Spanish villa. As with Maganov, people who knew Protosenya doubted he would commit such a brutal murder-suicide.
Avayev also allegedly killed his wife and teenage daughter in a murder-suicide at their posh Moscow apartment, using a gun.
Several other Russian millionaires unconnected with the energy industry have died under enigmatic circumstances since the invasion of Ukraine began, and a high-level manager at Russia’s state Gazprom energy company, 60-year-old Leonid Schulman, reportedly committed suicide a month before Russian troops moved into Ukraine.
A Russian banker named German Gorbuntsov said in a June documentary film called Secrets of the Oligarch Wives that these outbreaks of Sudden Oligarch Death Syndrome are just as sinister as they appear. He said even the slight variations in “suicide” methods are part of the design.
“A killer comes up with his own method when he’s ordered to take out a family. Similar methods but each slightly different—an axe here, a gun there. They’re dead all the same. Once perhaps, twice a coincidence. This is not a coincidence. It’s not suicide,” he said, seemingly referring to the Protesenya and Avayev murder-suicides.
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