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Yuri Voronov was not immediately a close friend of Putin. More like a business contact. He did meet the Russian president from time to time. The man became very rich with his transport company that did business with Gazprom, the Russian energy company. The man ran a logistics company that had secured lucrative contracts with Gazprom in the Arctic. For the time being, the police assumes a business conflict has gotten out of hand.
Voronov was found floating in his pool. Finished with at least one bullet to the head. The perpetrator had made little effort to hide the murder weapon. A semi-automatic Grand Power K100 pistol was found nearby, and several shell casings were found at the bottom of the pool. It is not clear how the perpetrator or perpetrators entered the highly secured domain.
He is already the sixth oligarch with ties to Putin and Gazprom to have died in mysterious circumstances since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Hung up
Alexander Tyulakov, 61, a senior Gazprom financial and security official, was found hanged in February. Investigators said he committed suicide, but an autopsy report showed signs of a severe beating, suggesting the hanging may have been staged. This was also the case with other deaths.
Three weeks earlier, 60-year-old Leonid Shulman was found dead in his bathroom in the same residential area. Shulman was the head of transportation at Gazprom Invest, a branch of the energy giant that handles its investment projects. He was stabbed. The perpetrator has not yet been found.
Toxic binoculars
Billionaire Alexander Subbotin (43) was found dead in his high-security villa in May. The former chief executive of the Russian oil company Lukoil had, according to an official statement from the police, sought advice from two shamans to cure a hangover. The shamans would have made an incision in his skin and dripped poison from a frog in it. After vomiting, the man would have felt better. But not much later, Subbotin had a heart attack and died. He too had ties to Gazprom and could even take up a top job there.
Financial Secrets
Vladislav Avayev, 51, who had ties to Gazprombank, was found dead in Moscow earlier this year after apparently first killing his 41-year-old wife Yelena and their 13-year-old daughter. Russian media allege that the former Kremlin official was poisoned. There are claims that he had access to the financial secrets of the Kremlin’s elite and was therefore silenced. Together with his wife and child.
Killed with an ax
Several days later, multimillionaire Sergey Protosenya (55) was found hanged in the courtyard of his villa in Lloret de Mar, Spain, after apparently first murdering his wife Natalia (53) and their teenage daughter Maria with an axe. As with Avayev, it is suggested that he was murdered and that the ax attack was staged.
Sergey Protosenya, 55, also an oligarch, is said to have amassed a fortune of around 400 million euros.
According to the Russian police, an investigation into the murder of Yuri Voronov was launched this week, and no connection could be made between the various facts for the time being.
But according to Russian media, relatives of the killed millionaires do not believe that. According to them, they had previously fallen out of favor with the Kremlin and it had everything to do with the war. Incidentally, it was striking that the names of the six were not on the list of oligarchs against whom the West has imposed sanctions.
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