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THE Kremlin has been accused of covering up the death of a sacked Russian minister after signs of torture were allegedly found on his body just 24 hours before his apparent suicide. Roman Starovoit, who was Vladimir Putin's transport minister for less than a year, was dismissed from his post on July 7 - just hours before he was found dead. Telegram channels with links to the Russian security forces reported Starovoit's cause of death as suicide - claiming the minister was found dead with gunshot wounds. However, an independent Russian media outlet now reports that he had been beaten...

THE girlfriend of Vladimir Putin's transport official who was found dead ahead of a fraud inquiry could be banned from his funeral. Roman Starovoit, 53, was sacked by Vlad on Monday after he couldn't stop Ukraine causing mayhem to Russia's aviation industry - and was found dead hours later. He was found beside his Tesla with a bullet wound to his head as the mystery behind his "suicide" deepens. Now it has emerged that his long-term girlfriend, 25-year-old Polina Korneeva, might be barred from attending his funeral. Polina was brought to the scene by law enforcement to identify the corpse...

Russia's sacked transport minister has been found dead in his Tesla outside Moscow with a gunshot wound and the principal hypothesis is that he took his own life, state investigators said on Monday, hours after President Vladimir Putin fired him. A presidential decree published earlier on Monday gave no reason for the dismissal of Roman Starovoit after barely a year in the job, though political analysts were quick to raise the possibility that he may have been dismissed in connection with an investigation into corruption in the region he once ran. Reuters could not independently confirm these suggestions, though a...

15 police officers and several civilians, including an Orthodox priest, killed in terrorist attack in Dagestan. Foreign Ministry: No Israelis or Jews among the victims. X link

Belarus foreign minister dies suddenly - one day after meeting Pope's envoy Ante Jozić amid speculation they were discussing a secret peace plan in Ukraine. CAREER SPY Makei had been foreign minister for a decade and was due tomorrow and Monday to host Vladimir Putin's foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in Minsk. Lavrov's spokeswoman said Russia was 'shocked' at his passing. No cause of death was given - but several sources speculated that his demise could be suspicious. Makei was described as 'healthy'. He had been trained in the Soviet GRU and had a reputation as Lukashenko's 'grey cardinal'. While Lukashenko...

Vladimir Putin's fierce rival and critic Alexei Navalny has died, according to the prison service. The Russian opposition leader, who was the most prominent and persistent domestic foe of President Vladimir Putin, had been serving a 19-year sentence on an extremism conviction. He had been incarcerated in central Russia’s Vladimir region, 140 miles east of Moscow. Navalny has been behind bars in Russia since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. Before his arrest, he campaigned against official corruption and organized major anti-Kremlin protests.

Some 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since Russia's full-scale invasion began, Volodymyr Zelensky has said in a rare admission of the extent of the nation's casualties. In a post on social media, the Ukrainian president said 370,000 injuries had been reported, though this figure included soldiers who had been hurt more than once and some of the injuries were said to be minor. He also claimed that 198,000 Russian soldiers had been killed and a further 550,000 wounded. The BBC has not been able to verify either side's figures.

A Russian ballet dancer who was an outspoken critic of Russia’s war in Ukraine has mysteriously plunged to his death from the fifth floor of a building. Vladimir Shklyarov, a married father of two, plummeted around 60 feet to the ground from a building on Saturday, a spokesperson for the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, where the 39-year-old was the highest-ranking dancer, told Fontanka. Russian authorities initially labeled the fall an accident, blaming the painkillers he was taking before a complex spinal surgery. However, he joins numerous other critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin who have met untimely ends —...

One of two men believed by British intelligence to have poisoned a Russian spy’s tea with a rare radioactive substance in London has died, according to a state-owned news agencyOne of the men accused of killing former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London has died of Covid-19 in Moscow, according to reports. Dmitri Kovtun was one of two men who a UK inquiry ruled had poisoned Litvinenko’s tea with a rare radioactive substance back in 2006. Reports from state-owned Russian news agency Tass said Kovtun contracted coronavirus before dying in a Moscow hospital. Kovtun, along with Andrei Lugovoi, was...

Read the article that may have gotten Alexander Litvinenko Killed

Russia has suffered its deadliest day of the war in Ukraine so far, with 1,950 soldiers killed in just 24 hours, according to the Ukrainian army. Vladimir Putin's losses in the war against Ukraine are piling up after thousands of Russian soldiers died in the last two days alone, with 1,770 soldiers being killed on Sunday and another 1,950 on Monday. The record number of 1,950 troops dying within a day serves as fresh humiliation for Putin after his two-day Kursk counter offensive on the weekend ended with 28 tanks blown up and 100 troops killed, according to reports. Footage...

A local corruption reporter in Russia died of head injuries on Monday in what police said Tuesday was a drunken fall. Colleagues, on the other hand, are sure it was a revenge attack for muckraking journalism. Vyacheslav Yaroshenko, 63, the editor of a Rostov-on-Don newspaper whose name translates as Corruption and Crime died Monday of a severe head injury sustained April 30. Police say Yaroshenko was drunk and hit his head on the stairs, but colleagues claim Yaroshenko was attacked. "I have no doubt that the attack was directly connected to Yaroshenko's writing and is payback for his journalistic work,"...

Russia's richest woman sues Forbes magazine MOSCOW, Feb 14 (Reuters) - Russia's richest woman, who is also the wife of Moscow's mayor, is suing the Russian edition of Forbes magazine for defamation over a story detailing her business interests, her company said on Wednesday. A spokesman for Yelena Baturina's Inteko firm said it had filed a suit against the magazine and its editor in Russian courts seeking compensation totalling 213,000 roubles ($8,100). "The article published in the December edition of Forbes magazine contains information which is not true," said Inteko spokesman Gennady Terebkov. That information included "the incorrect reproduction of...

The 44-year-old activist is well known nationally for his reports on the corruption that has flourished under President Vladimir Putin’s government. His wide support puts the Kremlin in a strategic bind — risking more protests and criticism from the West if it keeps him in custody but apparently unwilling to back down by letting him go free. Protests erupted in dozens of cities [90] across Russia on Saturday to demand the release of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin’s most prominent foe. Police arrested more than 3,000 people, some of whom took to the streets in temperatures as frigid as...

A high-level executive in Russia’s energy sector has died after apparently falling off a boat over the weekend, becoming the latest Russian powerbroker to perish under mysterious circumstances. Ivan Pechorin, 39, managing director of the Far East and Arctic Development Corporation (ERDC), was sailing off the coast of Russky Island in the Sea of Japan on Saturday when he fell overboard from the speeding vessel. His body was recovered from the water on Monday following an extended search. Only days earlier, Pechorin had attended the Eastern Economic Forum, which was hosted by President Vladimir Putin in Valdivostok. “Ivan’s death is...

It’s a dangerous time to be a Russian oil executive lately, as eight have died since January under suspicious circumstances. Six of them were linked to state-owned giant Gazprom, while the other two were with Lukoil, the second-largest oil company in the country.The most recent oligarch to meet an untimely end was Ravil Maganov, the (now former) chair of the board of directors of Lukoil who apparently fell from a 6-story window at a Moscow hospital on September 1. His company had criticized Russia’s invasion in Ukraine in March. Hmm.This morning Ravil Maganov, head of Lukoil board of directors, fell...

A high-ranking Russian law official believed to be the authority behind attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, who took part in the notorious Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr during the presidential campaign, has been killed in a mysterious helicopter crash. Deputy prosecutor-general Saak Karapetyan - a long-time ally of President Vladimir Putin - died last night when his AS-350 came down in Kostroma region northeast of Moscow during an unauthorized flight. Karapetyan had been in charge of Russian criminal investigations into the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the UK, and the deaths of Putin critic...

Earlier reports stated that the financial director for Gazprom, the largest publicly-listed natural gas company in the world and the largest company in Russia by revenue, has been found dead by suicide in St. Petersburg is inaccurate. Gazprom 'Financial Director' is not dead. The person found dead is the 61-year-old Alexander Tyuliakov. Alexander Tyulakov was the Deputy General Director of the Unified Settlement Center (UCC)of Gazprom for corporate security. Gazprom is a Russian majority state owned multinational energy corporation.

The circumstances of the death of the Deputy General Director of the Unified Settlement Center of Gazprom for Corporate Security, whose body was found in the prestigious village of Leninskoye in the Vyborg District of the Leningrad Region, are being established. A note was found nearby, law enforcement officials told 47news. A month earlier, in the same village, the body of a top manager of another division from Gazprom's orbit was found. Both of the now deceased previously worked at Gazprom Transgaz. As it became known to 47news, in the early morning of February 25, the police received a message...

Nikolai Glushkov, a Russian exile who was a close friend of a noted critic of President Vladimir Putin, has died from an "unexplained" cause in London, police say. The Metropolitan Police says that its counterterrorism unit is handling the case "because of associations that the man is believed to have had." Glushkov, 68, was a close friend of Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, a prominent critic of the Kremlin who was found dead in 2013. At the time, an inquiry found he had hanged himself — but Glushkov publicly disputed the idea that his friend and former business ally would have...