The Mystery of The Dead Russian Oligarchs.

I never did much like the classic British crime story, where a murder occurs in some small, obscure English village, filled with quirky characters, unusual methods of killing and unusual motives; stories crafted by very English writers like Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and Ellis Peters. To date there have been at least 132 murderous episodes of Midsomer Murders, which makes that fictional English county seem awfully dangerous.

No, in the face of the drive-by murders that happened in Chicago (and are happening more than ever now), where people are hardly ever even arrested, let alone convicted, the sheer randomness and frequency of modern murders made those English tales just too quaint, one even might say twee, to bear watching.

But there are times when such stories are worth looking at, as with The Mystery of The Dead Russian Oligarchs.

It seems that since January of this year six such people have committed suicide. This seems rather a high rate of death for people who seemingly have everything. I admit I didn’t notice any of this until this story broke a few days ago:

On April 18, former vice-president of Gazprombank Vladislav Avaev was found dead in his multi-million apartment on Universitetsky Prospekt in Moscow, together with his wife and daughter.

Murder-Suicide, and the murder of his own family no less. Unusual. Even amazing.

But it gets more amazing. Another two of those six oligarchs, Sergey Protosenya and Vasily Melnikov, also committed suicide after murdering their families.

[Protosenya], the 55-year-old millionaire was found hanged in the garden of the villa in Lloret de Mar by Catalonian police, Spanish media reported, while his wife and daughter were found in their beds with stab wounds on their bodies.
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According to police investigations mentioned by Kommersant, Melnikov—who reportedly worked for the medical firm MedStom—was found dead in the apartment together with his wife Galina and two sons. They had all died from stab wounds and the knives used for the murders were found at the crime scene.

I know that between a poor healthcare system, lousy diets and vodka, Russian men don’t have great life expectancy, but this is getting a little ridiculous. (Another one bites the concrete). Does anybody expect this as normal? (The Mystery of The Dead Russian Oligarchs)

What a coincidence. As a famous writer once put it.

“Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action’”

No shit Sherlock. I wonder if the Wagner Group are involved in helping the Police with their inquiries?

Wagner is Russia’s most famous private military company, and is reportedly named after its commander, Dmitry Utkin, a former Russian military intelligence (GRU) officer who used the nom de guerre Wagner during his service in Chechnya.

Wagner is active in eastern Ukraine, Syria, and several countries in Africa and Latin America.

The Russian oligarch, under whose business empire Wagner sits, is a solid pal of Putin’s, naturally. He actually got his toe in the door via catering:

Today, his official business is a sprawling catering consortium that provides meals to millions of Russian soldiers, policemen, prosecutors, hospital patients and schoolchildren in return for hefty tax-funded payments estimated at at least $3 billion since 2011. 

Normally I’d be very surprised if such a man committed suicide. On the other hand he’s leveraged this business into other things to help out President Putin, which may put him at risk when a scapegoat is needed:

During this period, Prigozhin spoke or texted with practically the entire leadership of the Presidential Administration Office, along with a number of senior figures at the FSB, in the Federal Protective Service (FSO) and the Ministry of Defense. In particular, he called and texted Dmitry Peskov – President Putin’s adviser and spokesperson – a total of 144 times. He also called – or was called by – Anton Vayno, Putin’s chief of staff, a total of 99 times.

As well as similar numbers of calls and texts with a lot of other higher ups that would not appear to be connected with catering, even to the Russian Army. At the link (from the Bellingcat investigative site) is a clickable chart for all this with more detail. In case you’re wondering about them being “a CIA-backed venture”, well let’s just say that although their focus has been Russia in Syria and Ukraine, the Dutch-based outfit doesn’t express a lot of warmth to the USA either, given their uncovering of the use of Croatia as a front for shipping MANPAD missiles to Jihadi fighters in Syria.

How they got hold of Prigozhin’s information is a story in itself:

This investigation is based on a review of leaked email archives belonging to employees working for Prigozhin’s group of companies. Some of these archives have already been subject of investigations by independent Russian media while others have been obtained exclusively by the investigative team. We have validated the authenticity of the messages and contained documents through interviews with several former and current employees of Prigozhin’s overseas influencing operations.
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Bellingcat has analyzed Prigozhin’s telephone records for an eight-month period spanning late 2013 and early 2014. The records were obtained from hacked emails of Prigozhin’s personal assistant leaked in 2015 by the Russian hacking collective Shaltai Boltay. The emails contained telephone billing records for his company Concord Consulting & Management, and we were able to identify Prigozhin’s personal number among the list of corporate numbers based on a reverse-phone-number-search app.

You may have heard that name before if you follow US politics. Concord is the troll farm that bombarded Facebook and Twitter with about $100,000 worth of adverts and bots (fake accounts) during the 2016 US election. To be fair it should be pointed out that while this was claimed to be “Russian interference” in the election by the Mueller Trump-Russian Collusion Investigative team, leading to Concord and a bunch of other Russians being indicted in 2018, the entire case collapsed when Concord’s lawyers unexpectedly turned up in court demanding to see the evidence, only for the Mueller team to squeal about how they needed more time or that it was “sensitive” information. The judge, aware that when an indictment is made it means you’re ready to go to trial, promptly threw the whole thing out.

Even so, Prigozhin is clearly one of Putin’s right hand men and is up to his armpits with Concord, the Wagner Group and a lot of other business. I’d say he’s playing with fire:

When you combine this with stories of a purge within the Russian domestic security service (150 FSB Foreign Intelligence Agents and Putin’s Domestic Policy Advisor Purged for Ukraine Fiasco), the head of Putin’s personal paramilitary force being placed under arrest (Top General in Putin’s Personal Army Is Arrested by FSB), the firing of eight senior generals, and a fresh purge underway in the Ukraine theater, one is not left with the view of a healthy government.