Since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine there have been 39 mysterious deaths of figures connected to the Russian president. The cases of Litvinenko, Politkovskaya, Baburova, Nemtsov and the Maganov and Antonov "suicides"
In Russia, Europe and even America. There are so many sworn enemies of Vladimir Putin who have met a bad end.
Unexplained accidents, assaults, suicides and absolutely brilliant murders. A trail of blood that spans time, from the early 2000s to today.
Of course, these are Kremlin-related episodes entirely coincidentally, at least until proven otherwise.
The site "Gbnews.com" has calculated that only since the beginning of the special military operation in Ukraine in February of last year, there have been 39 mysterious deaths of characters related to the Russian president.
And now that the Attorney General has announced that the criminal investigation into Prigozhin is by no means closed as it was said to be after Saturday's deal, many people think that the head of Wagner would do well to watch his back.
The last case that ended up in the media dates back to three months ago, when oligarch Sergei Grishin, known for selling his California villa to Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, died of septicemia in Moscow.
Not a very famous person, but still a former banker who had strongly criticized the work of the "Kremlin Lord", like other entrepreneurs involved in strange murder-suicide chains together with the whole family: Vasily Melnikov, Vladislav Avayev and Sergei Protosenya.
Far better known, and almost indisputably linked to the state apparatus, is the case of Alexei Navalny, Putin's main political opponent, who suffered a sensational poisoning attempt in Siberia before going to prison.
While he was at a political meeting, people belonging to the secret service of the army, the GRU, contaminated his underwear with the chemical preparation "Novichok".
The two mysterious Russian "tourists" also responded to Gru, who in 2018 in Salisbury, Great Britain, distributed the same nerve agent on the door handle of a former Russian agent who had defected to the British years ago. . And that it was providing other important information.
Also in that case the target, Sergei Skripal, managed to survive the poisoning along with his daughter Yulia, who had also touched the door.
Another high-profile case in which figures connected to the Russian secret services used toxic (in this case radioactive) materials is that of Alexander Litvinenko, one of the first great assassinations, which took place in London in 2006.
He too had a past as a former agent of the "enemy", which continued to trouble the regime. Two of his former colleagues served him a cup of tea laced with polonium in a Mayfair hotel in Britain.
The former Russian agent died in hospital after a terrible agony. Much more often, hired killers (in Russia it has never been revealed who the instigators were), preferred to use more direct, albeit less sophisticated, methods.
In the same fall of 2006, journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead while waiting for the elevator in her home. In fact, someone had previously tried to poison him on the plane, but it didn't go well.
Again, several exponents of human rights organizations were killed by gunfire, such as Natalia Estemirova, kidnapped and killed in 2009, lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova, shot together in the same year.
Even Boris Nemtsov, a leading opposition figure who was also deputy prime minister under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, was shot near the Kremlin on the street in 2015. Countless cases of accidents, all quite strange.
Like that of Mikhail Lesin, who had been Minister of Information under Putin and who in 2015 was found dead in a hotel room in Washington. The autopsy found that he had drunk large amounts of alcohol and had violently hit his head.
Also suspicious was the death of former oligarch, who had been very close to Putin before he split, Boris Berezovsky. In 2013, his body was found in the bathroom of his Surrey cottage.
The cases have been fatal for some critics of the Kremlin. The most famous, perhaps, are former Lukoil oil company chairman Ravil Maganov and billionaire Pavel Antonov, who both died last year after saying inappropriate things about Russian Special Military Operation in Ukraine.
Maganov fell from a hospital window in Moscow, while Antonov flew from a hotel window while in India to celebrate his birthday./ Corriere della Sera