The trail of dead Russians

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The trail of dead Russians

This is a very particular kind of Kremlinology: an account of Russian officials who have died (in a couple instances, almost died) in odd circumstances since the US Presidential election of 2016. By no means do I claim that these events are all related to the Trump-Russia scandal: some of them may be no more scandalous than an early death caused by too much vodka. However, the number of such deaths and their closeness in time has raised eyebrows; as Clint Watts, ex-FBI-agent and counter-terrorism expert said at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing: in order to investigate the Russia angle in our elections, one possible opening is to “follow the trail of dead Russians”.

The Russian campaign of propaganda and hacking in order to influence the US election appears to have started in March 2016. Very early on they developed a preference for Donald Trump, to add to Putin’s long-standing resentment of Hillary Clinton. Both together, it led to the events during 2016 that we are familiar with: the DNC leaks sourced from Wikileaks; the propaganda streaming from Russia TV amplified by Putin-sponsored social media trolls; the proliferation of fake news; and more ominously, the hacking of voter rolls in several states.

US Intelligence Agencies have reported on Russia’s unmistakable fingerprints over these operations. Meanwhile, a dossier collected by a retired M16 spy during the last several months of 2016 hints at a deeper entanglement: it claims Russian Intelligence has compromising intelligence on Trump, and that there was explicit collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Here is a chronological account of deaths and near-deaths. We begin on the rather arbitrary (but meaningful) point-in-time of election morning 2016.

1. November 2016: death of Sergei Krivov, consular employee

On November 8th 2016, election morning, an unconscious man was found under the Russian Consulate in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was Sergei Krivov, suffering from an apparent head wound. He died before he could be treated.

As a long-time resident of Manhattan and a Consulate employee, his case was strange because his name, and even existence, seemed curiously absent from public records — he had lived as a phantom. As a matter of fact his death seemed destined to disappear into this same cloud of anonymity, had Buzzfeed reporter Ali Watkins not delved into its details.

Her article detailing the circumstances of his death appeared three months later in February. While his title known in the US was security officer, which gives the impression of something like a guard, Russian press reported on him as duty commander at the Consulate. What that means is that it would have been part of his responsibilities to make sure that US Intelligence could not gain access into the secrets of the building. It is a privileged position. He would have been key to decoding secret communications to and from the Consulate with Russian channels.

Though he had lived in Manhattan for decades, there was no trace of him in public records, nor did anyone seem to have known him at all, not even the few New Yorkers who shared his last name. His address on file with the NYPD, mysteriously, turned out to be a Smithsonian office.

In addition, the case at NYPD about his death was closed prematurely, before the Medical Examiner’s office could reach a conclusion. Any further attempts by the Buzzfeed reporter to find out more seem to have been forestalled; the State Department would say nothing, nor could she elicit a comment from the Russian Consulate. In fact, even the knowledge we have of his name comes from an anonymous tip-off by an NYPD police officer.

Sergei Krivov’s death, and, it appears, much of his life, still remains a mystery.

2. December 2016: shooting of Andrei Karlov, Ambassador to Turkey

On December 19th, the killing of Andrei Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Turkey, was broadcast live as he gave a speech at an Ankara art gallery. One sees the entire action: the shooter pacing behind him for minutes, then seeming to gather up courage to draw his gun and shoot him. The ambassador collapses; and the youngish assassin shouts ‘Remember Aleppo, remember Syria’ in Arabic, waving his gun as the gallery clears around him.

Ambassador Karlov had recently had to play a role in easing tensions between Russia and Turkey over Russia’s involvement in the Syrian civil war. He was the first Russian ambassador assassinated since Pyotr Voykov was killed in Warsaw in 1927.

3. December 2016: shooting of Petr Polshikov, ex-Ambassador

While the assassination of any diplomat is very unusual, on this particular day of December 19th there were two Russian diplomats shot in different parts of the world. A few hours after the shooting of Andrei Karlov in Ankara, Petr Polshikov was gunned down in his apartment in Moscow.

He was found dead with two bullet wounds to his head and gun shells were found under the kitchen sink. He had been an ambassador to Latin America, and was then advising the Russian foreign ministry on Latin American issues.

4. December 2016: killing of Oleg Erovinkin, Rosneft treasurer

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4166610/Kremlin-covered-murder-former-KGB-chief.html

On Boxing Day (December 26th), Oleg Erovinkin, ex-KGB, was found dead in the back seat of his Lexus in the Chinatown district of Moscow. He was the main aide and treasurer to Igor Sechin, who is the Chairman of Russian oil giant Rosneft and called the ‘de facto deputy’ of Putin. Erovinkin served as the primary liaison between Sechin and Putin.

Although his death was spun by Russian sources as an age-related heart attack (Erovinkin was 61), there were a number of suspicious circumstances surrounding it, detailed by Russia expert Christo Grozev of Risk Management Lab, a think tank in Bulgaria.

The death was covered by Life.ru, which is a Russian state organ. The initial reports state that Erovinkin was ‘killed’ in the back of his car. While the headline quickly changed to ‘found dead’, scraping websites and news aggregators picked up the original headline.

Grozev also speculates with excellent substantiation that Erovinkin was one of the main sources for one of the Steele dossier’s linchpin claims: that Trump’s team was in talks with Sechin for a share in Rosneft as a kickback for removing sanctions. By this point the dossier was starting to become available to a variety of politicians and journalists. He speculates that by then Putin would have had a copy lying at his desk, and it must have become clear to him that one of Steele’s sources had been Erovinkin.

5. January 2017: Andrei Malanin, consular head in Greece, found dead

Andrei Malanin was the consular head at the Russian embassy in Greece. He was found dead on his bedroom floor at his apartment in Athens on January 9th. It appeared that the door had been locked from the inside. Authorities said that while it appeared to be a death from natural causes, autopsies had not yet been done. However, since this was the third Russian diplomat death within a month, it set off some speculation about toxins that would cause death by what seemed like natural means.

6. January 2017: death of Ambassador to India, Alexander Kadakin

Same month, another dead Russian diplomat. Alexander Kadakin was the head of the Russian diplomatic mission in India. He died of heart failure in hospital after a brief illness. He appeared to have promoted India’s ties with Russia and spoke fluent Hindi.

7. February 2017: Activist Vladimir Kara-Murza survives poisoning

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/07/europe/vladimir-kara-murza-suffers-organ-failure/

Open Russia activist and Putin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza fell violently ill on February 3rd. His symptoms appeared to be due to poisoning, and his wife immediately accused the Kremlin.

He had survived a prior poisoning attempt in 2015 and spent some time in a coma, but recovered. At that time, he had been making a documentary about Boris Nemstov, opposition leader who had been shot on a bridge (this documentary will be airing in NY on May 1st 2017). His blood sample then was found to have many times more heavy metals than is normal.

8. February 2017: death of UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin:

Vitaly Churkin, the Russian Ambassador to the UN, died in New York on February 20th. He appeared to have a history of heart problems and died in hospital.

He was the ambassador through many rocky events in Russia’s global role, such as the invasion of Crimea and the crisis in Libya and Syria. Although he always defended Russia publicly, he had privately been known to be very critical of Putin and had called his government a ‘kleptocracy’.

Although no foul play was initially suspected, the New York Medical Examiner’s Office said more study would be needed to determine the cause of death. A few weeks later, it turned out that the State Department asked the Medical Examiner to not release the cause of his death, due to, they said, ‘diplomatic immunity’.

However, there is also a possibility that Churkin was killed in order to cover up for Ukraine’s ousted President Yanukovych, Putin ally and Manafort client, who is now being tried in Ukraine for treason. The issue is a letter that Yanukovych sent to Putin in 2014, asking for Russian troops to attack Ukraine to save him; this letter was shown by Churkin at the UN. Now that this is being seen as possible treason, Yanukovych and the Kremlin deny that this ever happened. Two days after Churkin’s death, Yanukovych was heard in an interview denying that the letter was ever sent.

9. March 2017: death of Ukrainian businessman Alex Oronov

Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/jasonaleopold/a-suspicious-death-in-trumps-orbit-total-bullshit-says-famil

On March 2nd, Alex Oronov, a Ukrainian-born US citizen who made millions in agribusiness, passed away in unexplained circumstances. He was not famous, nor involved in government — so his death did not make the news; rather, it was announced in a Facebook post by a friend of his: Andrii Artemenko. Noticed by a US reporter, this news instantly raised eyebrows among US journalists who had been following the unfolding Trump-Russia scandal.

Although unnamed, Alex Oronov had been a presence in a NY Times report that came out less than two weeks earlier about a secret meeting held about a backchannel peace plan between a Putin-allied Ukranian politician and some Trump associates. The Ukrainian politician was Andrii Artemenko, named above as the man who wrote on Facebook about his friend’s death. He was looking for help ousting the current leader of Ukraine from the man who had just become US President. The plan also involved the removal of US sanctions on Russia.

The meeting between him and Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, had been arranged by Alex Oronov — Michael Cohen’s brother’s father-in-law; he had been the link between the two groups, mentioned in the NY Times report as ‘a mutual friend’. The Facebook post written upon his death does not name the cause of death, but is very clear that the negative attention that arose out of the NY Times report was somehow responsible: Artemenko himself was called a traitor in Ukraine and harassed on the streets; and, he said, Oronov died, not through old age, nor sickness or accident, but rather, due to the attention from US journalists. It is still unclear what the precise cause of death was.

10. March 2017: Magnitsky lawyer Nikolai Gorokhov survives fall from window

Before the Trump-Russia scandal bred a trail of dead Russians, the Magnitsky case bred its own.

In 2009, Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian tax attorney who had uncovered one of the biggest tax frauds perpetrated on the Russian public — to the tune of one billion dollars — was tortured and killed in jail, and posthumously convicted for tax evasion: in other words, the same crime that he had investigated. That case led, in 2012, to the US passing the Magnitsky Act that imposes sanctions on human rights violators. In a tit-for-tat response to this, the Russian government banned certain US people from entering their country.

Among that list of banned US people was Preet Bharara, US Attorney in NY, recently fired by the Trump administration. It turns out that Preet Bharara had opened a corruption case against Prevezon Holdings, a Cyprus company, that has been accused of laundering some of the illegitimate funds from the tax fraud case investigated by Magnitsky.

On March 21st, Nikolai Gorokhov, a Russian lawyer, fell from his 4th floor Moscow apartment, and is now recovering in hospital. His connection to the above case comes about because on the very next day, he was due to testify on behalf of the Justice Department. His testimony would have been invaluable because of his understanding of Russian financial documents.

Gorokhov is also the lawyer for the Magnitsky family as they attempt to get justice for Sergei Magnitsky’s death. He was also expected to present new evidence to do with that case. Fortuitous fall indeed, where the Russian mafia is concerned.

Life.ru, the state-aligned Russian TV channel was first on the scene as Gorokhov fell, and reported that he had been attempting to move a hot tub between floors.

11. March 2017: ex-Russian MP Denis Voronenkov gunned down

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/23/europe/ukraine-former-russian-lawmaker-denis-voronenkov-killed/

From being very much part of the Russian state, having been elected as Member of Parliament in 2011 through a rigged election, Denis Voronenkov had recently, in 2016, turned against Putin and fled to Ukraine with his wife, also a former Member of Parliament. There, he had promised to testify in a case of treason against exiled Ukrainian President Yanukovych, who has strong Kremlin ties and currently lives in Russia.

While in Ukraine he was hunted by the FSB, Russia’s primary security agency. As he told the Daily Beast reporter in February:

“Americans should realize that Putin and his guys are convinced that he spins the planet with his feet,” like a soccer ball, Voronenkov told The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview. “The FSB cyber forces are quite powerful globally. Now they do not just listen to you (they listened and recorded all my phone calls for eight years). They also attack other states.”

He had been given protection in the form of a bodyguard by Ukrainian security services. However, he was gunned down on a busy Kiev street in broad daylight. The bodyguard got into a gun battle with the assassin, who was also killed.

The man he was to testify against for treason — Vikotr Yanukovych — spent four years as the President of Ukraine, until he was ousted and fled to Russia. He was elected in 2010 despite a very fraught history prior to that; with charges of corruption and rigged elections and a reputation as a brute. He was able to overcome that fraught history due to the image makeover he received due to working with one man — Paul Manafort.

There is no evidence that Voronenkov would have testified against Manafort if he hadn’t been killed. But the Ukrainian government has repeatedly wanted to question Manafort in corruption cases, and are also interested in his involvement in a shooting of anti-government protesters in 2014.

12. March 2017: Russian Interior Ministry official Nikolai Volkov killed

On March 27th, an official with the Russian Ministry in charge of construction was shot dead in Moscow. Russian authorities reported it as a robbery, and said that the assailant made off with his briefcase.

However, it also turns out that the killed man had discovered an embezzlement of $175 million dollars and refused to sign financial documents that he was being pressured to sign.

13. April 2017: journalist and Putin critic Nikolai Andrushchenko dies

73-year-old journalist Andrushchenko had been a thorn in the side of Russian oligarchy for several years. He had been jailed in 2007 and his newspaper’s offices raided for publishing articles in favor of the opposition (among whom at the time was Garry Kasparov, former chess champion, who now lives in the US). He spoke out against Putin and said that money was at the center of his politics. Over the years, he had investigated the corruption of local authorities and was often tight-lipped about what he was working on.

Such was also the case on March 9th when he was found on a St Petersburg street lying unconscious on the ground with severe head trauma. Although Russian state TV reported it as an injury from falling down while drunk, Andushchenko had been attacked several times in the past by unknown assailants. He never recovered from the medically-induced coma and passed away on April 19th.

Previous assassinations

After the fall of Soviet Russia in 1991, the brief promise of a reformed democracy was instead perverted into an autocracy, with Russian secret service resuming their old communist-era primacy over all aspects of running the state. Vladimir Putin, himself an ex-KGB officer, rose to the top of the scramble for owning Russia’s future; on the way, he quashed several democrats and liberals who would have wanted to emulate Western Democracies.

Russia analysts have documented how this happened; currently, there is no daylight between the Kremlin, the financial elite, and organized crime. Political assassinations have also become more and more common. Several assassinations used exotic poisons that became a clue for investigators; others used the plausible deniability of contract killers. Here is a list, in reverse chronological order, of an older trail of dead Russians; by no means a complete list.

In January 2016, chief of military intelligence service (GRU) Igor Sergun dies in mysterious circumstances. Being the head of GRU, he would have been responsible for the annexation of Crimea.

A few months earlier, in December 2015, Alexander Shushukin, a general who commanded the operations in Crimea, dies of cardiac failure.

In November 2015, founder of Russia Today (RT) and one-time head of Russia’s biggest energy company Gazprom, ex-Putin-ally Mikhail Lesin killed in a Washington DC hotel from blunt head trauma.

In February 2015, Boris Nemstov, opposition leader, shot to death on a Moscow bridge. A few months later, his friend and Open Russia activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was then making a documentary about Nemstov, took ill from an apparent case of poisoning.

In March 2013, Boris Berezovstky, Russian tycoon and Putin critic, found dead in the UK with a noose around his neck.

In November 2012, Russian businessman and whistleblower in the Magnitsky case, Alexander Perepilichny died of probable poisoning in London.

In November 2009, Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian lawyer who discovered a massive tax fraud by the Klyuev crime group, died in custody after being tortured. His death prompted a number of anti-corruption laws across the world and US sanctions on a number of Russian individuals.

In July 2009, human rights activist Natalya Estemirova who had called for Putin to face trials over atrocities in Chechnya was shot in Grozny.

In November 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, former FSB officer turned whistle-blower, author of the book Blowing up Russia, poisoned by polonium in the UK. Before his death, he himself and three other KGB defectors directly blamed the Kremlin. Two of the investigators into his death in the UK also died in odd circumstances soon after.

In October 2006, Russian journalist and human rights activist Anna Politskovkaya was shot dead in Moscow. She was a strong critic of the Kremlin, having written books about the Chechen wars and also one called Putin’s Russia: Life in a failing Democracy.

Yushchenko before and after poisoning (source: Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine)

In September 2004, Viktor Yushchenko, third President of Ukraine, and opponent of Putin-allied Manafort-client Yanukovych fell violently ill from dioxin poisoning. His face still bears the scars.

In February 2000, former mayor of St Petersburg and Putin’s mentor Anatoly Sobchak died in mysterious circumstances; his bodyguards had to be treated for mild symptoms of poisoning afterwards.

In November 1998, three months after Putin took over at the FSB, Russian democrat and Kremlin critic Galina Starovoitova is gunned down in what appears to be a political hit. Though her assailants were arrested, the higher-ups who called the hit have never been identified.

https://extranewsfeed.com/the-trail-of-dead-russians-da27ee4a2bdc

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