Fact Check: Putin’s Mysteriously Disappearing ‘Enemies’

Evgeny Prigozhin, head of Russian mercenary supplier Wagner, has been killed after a private plane crashed north of Moscow. He was killed exactly two months after the uprising.

Prigozhin, 62, led a coup against senior Russian military officials on June 23 and 24, which President Vladimir Putin said could have plunged Russia into civil war.

Several others opposed to Putin or his interests have also died or come close to death under unclear circumstances. Details of some of them are collected here.

Alexey Navalny

Russia’s top opposition leader Alexei Navalny was flown to Germany for treatment after being poisoned in Siberia in August 2020. Russia has denied involvement.

Navalny was praised around the world for voluntarily returning to Russia in 2021, but was immediately arrested upon arrival. He is now serving a total of 11-and-a-half years for fraud and other charges.

His political movement has been termed illegal and ‘extremist’. Navalny’s sentence was recently increased to 19 years.

Sergei Skripal

Sergei Skripal, a former Russian double agent who provided classified information to British intelligence, and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a bench outside a shopping center in the UK’s cathedral city of Salisbury in March 2018.

He was taken to hospital in critical condition and British authorities said he had been poisoned with Novichok, a group of nerve agents developed by the Soviet military in the 1970s and 1980s. However, both survived.

Russia has denied any role in the poisoning and accused Britain of stoking anti-Russian fanaticism.

Vlady Mir Kara – Mirza

Vlady Mirkara Mirza, an opposition activist in Russia, says he believes there were attempts to poison him in 2015 and 2017. According to the Reuters news agency, a laboratory in Germany later found high levels of mercury, copper, manganese and zinc in them. Moscow has denied involvement.

Alexander Litvenko

British authorities say former KGB agent Alexander Litvenko died in 2006 at the age of 43 at London’s Millennium Hotel after drinking green tea laced with the rare and powerful radioactive isotope polonium-210.

In 2016, a British investigation concluded that Putin may have approved the assassination. The Kremlin has denied involvement.

An investigation led by a senior British judge revealed that Andrei Lugovoy, a former KGB bodyguard, and another Russian, Dmitry Kovton, carried out the killing as part of what they said was an operation. This was likely done at the direction of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB.

Litvenko had fled Russia to Britain six years before he was poisoned.

Alexander Periplichny

The 44-year-old Russian national was found dead in November 2012 while jogging near his luxury home on an exclusive gated estate outside London.

Alexander Peripelechny was granted asylum in the UK in 2009 after helping a Swiss investigation into a Russian money laundering scheme. His sudden death suggests that he may have been murdered.

British police ruled out the plot, despite suspicions that he had been killed by a rare poison. A pre-trial investigation revealed that traces of a rare and deadly poison from the Gelsemium plant were found in his stomach.

Before his death, Peripelechny drank a large bowl of soup containing sorrel, a popular Russian dish. Russia has denied involvement.

Victor Yushchenko

Viktor Yushchenko, the leader of the Ukrainian opposition at the time, was poisoned during the 2004 presidential election campaign in which he ran on a pro-Western ticket against pro-Moscow Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych.

He said he was poisoned when he was having dinner outside Kiev with members of the Ukrainian security services. Russia has denied involvement.

This dangerous substance was found to be 1000 times more than the normal dioxin in his body. His face and body were disfigured by the poison and he underwent dozens of operations.

He contested and won a re-run presidential election after the Supreme Court overturned the results in favor of Yanukovych during the ‘Orange or Orange Revolution’ protests in the streets of Ukraine.

Anna Politkovskaya

Anna Poltkovskaya, a journalist reporting on human rights abuses, was shot dead outside her apartment in Moscow on 7 October 2006 as she returned home from a supermarket.

The killing of Poltkovskaya, a 48-year-old mother of two, sparked outrage in the West and raised concerns about the dangers to journalists working in Russia.