The full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been an unusually dangerous time for Russian officials and senior executives responsible for state and private oil and gas companies. Death has claimed top managers at corporations such as Gazprom, Lukoil, and Transneft. On July 7, Transportation Minister Roman Starovoit reportedly shot himself in his car hours after Vladimir Putin dismissed him by executive order. Starovoit joins a long list of officials and executives whose deaths have been ruled suicides by authorities. Meduza reviews the reports about these deaths.

• January 2022: Leonid Shulman, head of the transport service for Gazprom Invest, was found dead in the bathtub of his country house in an affluent neighborhood outside St. Petersburg.
• February 2022: Alexander Tyulyakov, deputy director of Gazprom’s Unified Settlement Center for Corporate Security, was found hanged in the garage of his house in a cottage settlement outside St. Petersburg.
• April 2022: Vladislav Avaev, vice president of Gazprombank, was found shot dead in his Moscow apartment. The bodies of his wife and their young daughter were discovered nearby.
• April 2022: Sergey Protosenya, former top manager of Novatek, was found dead at his villa in Spain. His wife and their daughter were also found murdered in the house.
• May 2022: Alexander Subbotin, a former member of Lukoil’s board of directors, was found dead in a house in Mytishchi, a city outside Moscow. Preliminary reports attributed the death to acute heart failure.
• July 2022: Yuri Voronov, founder of Astra-Shipping (a Gazprom subcontractor), was found dead in a swimming pool in a cottage settlement in Leningrad Region with a gunshot wound to the head.
• August 2022: Ravil Maganov, chairman of Lukoil’s board of directors, fell from a window at a hospital in Moscow where he was undergoing treatment.
• December 2022: Oleg Zatsepin, general director of Kogalymneftegaz (a Lukoil subsidiary in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous District), was found dead in his office.
• February 2023: Vyacheslav Rovneyko, co-founder of Urals Energy, an oil businessman from the late 1990s, and former business partner of Boris Yeltsin’s son-in-law, was found dead in his house on Rublyovka Highway, Moscow’s most exclusive residential area.
• October 2023: Vladimir Nekrasov, chairman of Lukoil’s board of directors, died of acute heart failure.
• March 2024: Vitaly Robertus, vice president of Lukoil, was found dead in his Moscow office.
• July 2025: Andrey Badalov, vice president of Transneft, fell from the window of his apartment on Rublyovskoye Highway in Moscow.
• July 2025: Roman Starovoit, dismissed from his position as Russia’s transportation minister, took his own life in a parking lot outside Moscow.

Cover photo: Sergey Savostyanov / TASS / Profimedia