I remember back in the early days of the global pandemic and doctors were falling out windows, Russian doctors that is….well since those days there have been many Russians high placed that have met with untimely ‘ends’…..and we can add yet another one to the list.

What’s not being disputed is that the chair of one of Russia’s largest oil producers has died after falling out of a hospital window. What’s murkier, however, is what led to Ravil Maganov’s demise—what CBS News notes is the sixth death this year of a big-name Russian energy exec under eyebrow-raising circumstances. On Thursday, Russian state news agency TASS reported that the 67-year-old Lukoil chairman died by suicide after plummeting from a sixth-floor window, noting that Maganov had been in the hospital—IDed by the BBC as Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital—for treatment after a heart attack. “In addition, he was taking antidepressants,” TASS added.

However, two sources who say they knew Maganov well tell Reuters they don’t believe he would have taken his own life. His employer, meanwhile, announced in a statement that Maganov had died “following a serious illness.” Lukoil, which is Russia’s largest private company, has taken an unusually assertive stand against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, pleading in a March statement for negotiations and the “soonest possible end to armed conflict.” The company’s former president, oligarch Vagit Alekperov, stepped down in April after the UK and the EU sanctioned him over the Russian-led war.

Other energy company bigwigs who’ve recently died under mysterious circumstances include former Lukoil board member Alexander Subbotin, who was reported in May as having been found dead in a basement on the outskirts of Moscow, supposedly after receiving a shaman’s “treatment” involving toad poison. A month earlier, Sergei Protosenya, a former manager for Novatek, Russia’s largest liquefied natural gas producer, was found dead, along with his wife and daughter, in a villa in Spain. Local police say he killed his family, then himself. One person who might be feeling uneasy at the moment: Nail Maganov, Ravil’s brother, who heads up another Russian fuels firm, Tatneft, headquartered in the Tatarstan region.

There sure are a lot of ‘unexplained’ suicides in Russia (wink wink)…..

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