How Russia Silences Putin's Critics: A List of Dissidents Mysteriously Killed, Poisoned, Shot

Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death has put rife speculations about Kremlin’s involvement in the plane crash that killed the mercenary head who led a mutiny against Russian President Vladimir Putin two months back in June.

The death however adds to the list of dissenters, political opponents and prominent Russians who have been targeted or killed in mysterious circumstances. In the past two decades, several critics, opposition leaders, journalists who have criticised Putin or went against Kremlin have met similar fate for opposing the Russian President’s 23-year rule.

Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Death

Prigozhin’s private jet crashed on a routine flight from Moscow to St Petersburg just after 3pm local time. Confirmation of Prigozhin’s likely demise came in the form of announcements by Russia’s authorities and a Telegram channel linked to the Wagner group. Conveniently, there was also video footage of the plane falling out of the sky and burning on the ground.

With him on the aircraft was Dmitry Utkin, widely considered to be his second in command at the Wagner Group. Other passengers are reported to have included Valery Chekalov, the head of Wagner security, Yevgeny Makaryan, who has been described as Prigozhin’s bodyguard and other Wagner Group personnel.

Prigozhin joins a list of opponents, former soldiers and dissenters who were either killed, poisoned, or targeted abroad.

Poisoning

1. Alexander Litvinenko: The former spy and Putin opponent died of polonium-210 poisoning in London in 2006. Shortly before he died, he spoke to journalists about the FSB security service that was still operating poison laboratories from the Soviet era. An investigation into the death later revealed that Litvinenko was killed by Russian agents, probably with Putin’s approval.
2. Sergei Skripal: A former Russian military intelligence officer was similarly poisoned like Litvinenko using a nerve agent called Novichok, however he survived. Novichok refers to a group of nerve agents developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 80s to elude international restrictions on chemical weapons, according to The Guardian.
3. Alexei Navalny: The main Russian opposition leader, who is currently in jail, fell ill on a flight from Siberia to Moscow in August 2020. He was later flown to Germany for treatment where it was found that he had been poisoned with novichok.
4. Lesser Prominent Russians: Russian security services have also poisoned Russian citizens including the writer Dmitry Bykov and Pyotr Verzilov, an unofficial spokesperson for the punk art collective Pussy Riot, who was evacuated to Germany.

Shootings

• Anna Politkovskaya: In 2006, Politkovskaya, a Novaya Gazeta journalist who reported on human rights abuses, was killed outside her flat in Moscow. Five men and one former police officer were convicted of her murder, but the culprits were hired guns, carrying out somebody else’s orders.
• Boris Nemtsov: Nemtsov, a prominent opposition leader, was assassinated in central Moscow in 2015. He was shot four times in the back by an unknown assailant within view of the Kremlin. An investigation later revealed that he had been shadowed by FSB agents for almost a year before he was assassinated on a bridge.
• Zelimkhan Khangoshvili: Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Georgian citizen who fought against Russia during the second Chechen war in the early 2000s, was shot twice in the head at a park in central Berlin in 2019.

Unexplained mysteries

1. Boris Berezovsky: Berezovsky, a former Kremlin insider turned Putin critic, was found hanged in the bathroom of his home in 2013. He went into self-imposed exile in the UK in the early 2000s.
2. Mikhail Lesin: Mikhail Lesin, founder of the English-language television network RT or Russia Today, was found dead in a hotel room in Washington in 2015, where he was invited to attend a fundraising dinner.
3. Kirill Stremousov: The Russia-installed deputy governor of Kherson province in Ukraine died mysteriously in a car crash on the day that Ukrainian forces liberated the city of Kherson in the autumn of 2022. Stremousov, one the most prominent proponents of Russian occupation, had publicly suggested that Russia’s defence minister Sergei Shoigu, a close friend of Putin’s, should shoot himself.
4. Deaths in Odisha: earlier in January, three men from Russia died in mysterious circumstances in the coastal state of Odisha within a fortnight. The dead included a millionaire businessman and a lawmaker. Pavel Antov, one of the three Russians, was in news last year for criticising Putin over the Ukraine invasion.