Russian oil tycoon dies 'falling out of window' in latest mysterious death

An oil tycoon has died after falling from a Russian tower block and it is the latest in a long list of mysterious deaths since Vladimir Putin launched his Ukraine invasion.

Transneft vice-president Andrey Badalov, 62, lived on the 10th floor of an exclusive apartment block on Moscow’s Rublevskoye Highway, but he plunged 180 feet from the 17th floor. Investigators were reported to be “working at the scene”. A source said the “preliminary cause” of death is “suicide” and a letter supposedly written by Badalov to his wife was found, but other versions are being examined.

The tycoon was married with two daughters. “Badalov's body was found under the windows of an [apartment building] on Rublevskoye Highway,” a source told TASS.

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Transneft is Russia ’s state oil pipeline monopoly headed by a former KGB spy, Nikolai Tokarev, 74, who served with Vladimir Putin, 72, in Germany in the Cold War.

Badalov had studied at the General Staff Academy of the Armed Forces, which trains high-level officers and state managers. He had joined Transneft four four ago “during a complex and tense period” and helped the company “effectively overcome the challenges posed by [Western] sanctions”.

A spate of mysterious deaths of executives linked to the oil and gas industries have hit Russia since Putin started plotting his invasion of Ukraine more than three years ago. There have now been 11 deaths since the conflict began.

While they are often categorised as suicides, doubts have been raised in multiple cases. Today Ukrainian journalist Denis Kazansky posted sarcastically: "Top managers of YUKOS and Lukoil have already fallen out of windows before.

"What are you laughing at? They just fall out of windows themselves. Russian oil workers have this professional deformity. As soon as they approach the windows, their legs immediately give way."

In 2022, Ravil Maganov, chairman of Lukoil, Russia's second-largest oil company, died when he plunged from a sixth floor window at Moscow’s elite Central Clinical Hospital, also known as the Kremlin Clinic.

On the same morning, Putin - who had earlier decorated Maganov, 67, with a top honour - swept into the hospital to pay his final respects to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, who had died the same week.

In 2023, leading war official Marina Yankina, 58, head of the financial support department of the Russian Defence Ministry's Western Military District, was found dead after falling 160ft from a 16th-floor window in St. Petersburg.

The circumstances surrounding her death remain unclear. Former oil company vice president Mikhail Rogachev, 64, died after falling from his tenth-floor apartment in Moscow in October 2024. He had been a senior executive at Yukos, an oil company dismembered by Putin and his cronies.