Inside the mysterious wave of deaths among Russian oil execs
Mikhail Rogachev, the former vice president for corporate governance of the Yukos oil company, was found dead on the sidewalk in front of his home. According to local media, he apparently fell out of a window.
As reported by the pro-Kremlin Mash channel on Telegram, Rogachev was suffering from cancer, and his condition was advanced. Mash claims he left a farewell letter and, according to investigators, committed suicide.
However, the independent VChK-OGPU channel writes on Telegram that sources "close to Rogachev" categorically denied the cancer diagnosis. The deceased's relatives stated he had breakfast with his family, his mood was normal, and there were no indications of suicidal intent.
Meanwhile, the opposition Belarusian channel Nexta, writing about Rogachev's death, put the cause of death, supposedly falling out of a window, in quotation marks.
Not the first such case
As noted by the Lenta portal, since 2022, several managers of Russia's largest energy companies have died. In January 2022, the head of transportation at Gazprom Invest, Leonid Shulman, allegedly committed suicide. In March, Aleksandr Tyulakov, the general director of the Unified Settlement Centre for Corporate Security (responsible for Gazprom's finances), died, with suicide cited as the cause of death.
Vladislav Avayev, former vice president of Gazprombank, died in April 2022 along with his wife and daughter. It was considered an extended suicide. Sergey Protosenya, the former chief accountant of the gas company Novatek, also died alongside his wife and daughter. Their bodies were found in their Spanish home in the resort town of Lloret de Mar. In May, the former director of Lukoil, billionaire Aleksandr Subbotin, died suddenly. The death was attributed to acute heart failure, and shamanic rituals preceded the tragedy.
In July 2022, Yuri Voronov, who ran the transportation company Astra Shipping, which cooperated with Gazprom, was found dead near St. Petersburg. In September, the vice president of the Lukoil oil company, Ravil Maganov, was reported to have fallen from the sixth floor of a Moscow hospital. In the autumn of the following year, the chairman of the board of the Russian oil concern Lukoil, Vladimir Nekrasov, unexpectedly died of acute heart failure.
Media independent of the Kremlin reported that Nekrasov was the 17th high-level manager in Russia to have died since the start of the aggression in Ukraine in February 2022, with 10 being from boards of fuel and energy companies.
This fate affects not only people in the energy sector. In June 2023, Kristina Baikova, a 28-year-old vice president of the Russian Loko-Bank, was reported to have fallen out of a window, and in July 2024 – economist Valentina Bondarenko.
The Yukos company was established in 1993, co-founded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oppositionist living currently in London. At the beginning of the 21st century, Yukos was the largest oil company in Russia. The company went bankrupt in 2007, partly due to allegations of failing to pay owed taxes.
