NO RON O’ MILL ‘DISPUTE’
Getting on his Vlad side can be deadly
It’s a particularly deadly time to be on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bad side: The bodies of 39 critics that have piled up since war broke out in Ukraine underscore the point.
Just this month, two former big shots bit the dust.
Sergey Grishin, a financial fraudster and oligarch who sold Prince Harry and Meghan Markle their Montecito, Calif., mansion for $14.7 million, perished from sepsis March 6. Coincidence or not, this happened after he criticized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Virologist Andrey Botikov, who helped develop the controversial Sputnik V COVID vaccine, went in a less subtle manner March 1: He fell victim to a belt around his neck.
Energy bosses, politicians and outspoken critics are among those who have paid the ultimate price.
Putin and leaders of Russia’s bloodthirsty Kremlin, according to Russian expert Jon O’Neill, have their fingerprints on at least some of the deaths that range from the mysterious to the gruesome to the seemingly accidental.
“Putin does not want to murder people directly,” O’Neill, co-author of “The Dancer and the Devil: Stalin, Pavlova and the Road to the Great Pandemic,” told The Post. “If he does, he gets exposed all over the world. He wants people appearing to kill themselves or seeming to die from unusual diseases. Putin wants to kill people on a deniable basis.
“At the same time, everyone in Russia knows that these people are being murdered. It sends a message to those associated with Putin: You better stay in line.”
Suspicious deaths since March 2022 include those of Col. Vadim Boyko, the Ukraine war’s chief of mobilization, who was said to have committed suicide. Just one problem: He was shot five times.
Marina Yankina, a Russian defense official, plummeted 16 stories to her death from her apartment window. The St. Petersburg news outlet Mash maintained that she had committed suicide and had notified her husband before leaping to her death,
O’Neill believes that the death of Yankina and other military officials can be tied to failures Russia is experiencing in Ukraine.
Knew too much?
“It can’t be a mistake Putin made,” said O’Neill. “It has to be bad execution. Those people know too much about what really happened. That is why they are dying.”
For those with clout in Russia’s oil and gas industries, Sergey Protosenya’s death sent a collective chill.
Formerly the CEO of Novatek, a company with ties to the Kremlin, he and his family were enjoying life in Spain. But on April 19, 2022, his wife and two daughters were found at their villa, chopped up by an ax; Prostenaya was hanging from a noose. The government-controlled energy company painted it as a murder-suicide. However, Fedor Protosenya, Sergey’s son, has serious doubts.
“He loved my mother and especially Maria, my sister,” Fedor said. “He could never do anything to harm them. I don’t know what happened that night, but I know that my father did not hurt them.”
Oil boss Alexander Subbotin died May 8, 2022, allegedly of a “drug-induced heart attack” while attending a shamanic ritual.
O’Neill believes that these victims and others made the mistake of criticizing Putin’s overtures to China at the cost of Europe and the long-term health of Russia’s energy sector.
“The fear is that Putin’s desire to control Ukraine and take Russia’s [oil and gas resources] to China is driving Russia into the hands of China, which supplies Russia with weapons,” said O’Neill. “The people who express dissent get killed.”
Concurring is John Hardie, deputy director of Washington’s Russia program at Foundation for Defense of
Democracies.
“It’s a bad time to disagree with Putin,” Hardie told The Post. “There might have been a time when that would have slid. But tolerance to opposition to the war and the regime in general has narrowed considerably.”
Send a message
O’Neill insisted that there is a method behind the murderous madness.
“Some people you can disappear, but you want to kill them because it sends a message,” he explained. “Putin could have made [Protosenya] disappear and it would not have made much of a ripple. But he wanted it to be public.”
Not every death is as outrageous as dismembered relatives and multishot suicides. Some are attributed to unlikely accidents.
Gas executive Andrei Krukovsky fell off a cliff on Sochi. Real-estate oligarch Dimitriy Zelenov died after tumbling down a flight of stairs and whacking his head, and Vayachelav Taran, who made billions in crypto currency, died in a helicopter crash while flying from Switzerland to Monaco.
And then there is Gen. Alexei Maslov, who became mortally ill after Putin kiboshed a visit to the former army leader’s tank factory.
According to O’Neill, the deaths “are known as ‘liternoye assassinations.’: a practice that originated under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin that “means a death that looks like a natural death but is actually a murder.
“The most famous of the liternoye assassins was Sergei Spiegelglas. He famously said, ‘Anyone can murder someone. But it takes a true artist to carry out a natural death.’ ”