This article was originally published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and is reprinted with permission.
The top manager at Russia’s Corporation for the Development of the Far East and the Arctic (KRDV), Ivan Pechorin, has been found dead after media reports said last weekend that he fell out of a motorboat in the Sea of Japan close to the city of Vladivostok.
The KRDV said in a statement that Pechorin’s body was found on September 12.
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Pechorin’s death is the latest in a string of mysterious deaths among Russian executives to occur shortly before or after Russia’s ongoing unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
In early September, LUKoil, Russia’s largest private oil company and one of the few corporate voices to oppose to the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine, said its chairman, Ravil Maganov, had died in Moscow following a “serious illness,” while local media reports said the 67-year-old tycoon had plunged to his death from a hospital window.
In May, Russian media reported that a former top manager of LUKoil, Aleksandr Subbotin, was found dead in the basement of a house in the town of Mytishchi near Moscow.
Weeks before that, Vagit Alekperov, the founder and co-owner of LUKoil, resigned after he and other Russian tycoons were hit by sanctions by Australia and the United Kingdom over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. The same day, media reports said a former top manager at Russian gas giant Novatek, Sergei Protosenya, his wife, and daughter had been found dead in a rented villa in the town of Lloret de Mar near Barcelona.
Several other senior Russian businessmen and their families have also been found dead amid unclear circumstances since Russia started its full-scale aggression against Ukraine.
On February 8, KVRD Director General Igor Nosov died at the age of 43. The death was officially announced as caused by a stroke.
