At least 38 Russian business tycoons have died mysteriously since start of war in Ukraine

Russian businessmen may want to reconsider standing too close to windows.

At least 38 have died under mysterious circumstances since Russia invaded Ukraine, a Post analysis found — and in at least 10 cases officials claimed the deceased committed suicide by plunging from windows and balconies.

Three business leaders died just last month, and another this week, sparking renewed debate and speculation the Kremlin — known to silence its critics and political foes — had a hand in the defenestration epidemic.

The body count includes:

• Vyacheslav Leontyev, 87, was found dead Oct. 5 below the window of his sixth-floor Moscow apartment building, after apparently having a “nervous breakdown.” Leontyev headed up Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, and continued to run it after the USSR’s collapse in 1991. Andrey Malgin, an exiled opposition journalist who knew Leontyev, hinted his death may not have been an accident, writing on Telegram that Leontyev “knew a lot about the party’s money.”
• Construction company boss and a local pol friendly with Putin, Vitaly Kapustin, 43, was found Sept. 24 hanging from a tree by a cable anchored to his SUV, his hands tied behind his back, in a forest near Crimea.
• Alexander Tyunin, 50, was found Sept. 19 near his car on the outskirts of Moscow, with a hunting rifle and a note that read: “I did this myself.” He was CEO of the Umatex Group, Russia’s only carbon fiber manufacturer – a key raw material for the production of Shahed drones the Kremlin has been using in Ukraine.
• Alexey Sinitsyn, 43, was found Sept. 8 decapitated under a bridge near Kaliningrad, with a rope attached to his body. He was CEO of a Russian potash producer — an industry bringing $10 billion in exports and key to financing Putin’s war chest.

“The absurdity of these deaths is the point,” Peter Doran, a Russia expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Post. “They’re not supposed to look like suicides or natural deaths. The message is ‘when you get caught, bad things happen to you.’ “

Doran theorized greed and corruption are at the heart of many of the deaths.

The Kremlin stashes about $160 billion of dark money on the balance sheets of state-owned companies, which it uses to finance operations it doesn’t want its fingerprints on, including secret military and intelligence undertakings.

That money comes from the Russian federal budget, 30% of which was classified in 2025. This system of stashing and funneling money often extends to private companies whose leaders are friendly to Putin.

Doran says a large number of these businessmen were almost certainly caught embezzling some of those funds.

“Temptation is too powerful for some,” he said. “Many individuals are in the custody of large amounts of black cash, with no paper trail and no accountants looking over their shoulders.

“And when these individuals get caught, they happen to have spectacularly absurd suicides.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shined a light on the C-suite shenanigans, Doran said.

“The Kremlin came calling for the money that it had placed with individuals and discovered the money had been embezzled,” said Doran. “That’s why we saw a large uptick initially in these suspicious deaths and killings.

“The deaths are designed to be spectacular – spectacular and absurd. So that so that everyone else can see the cost of stealing from Vladimir Putin.”

Perhaps no industry has seen more suspicious deaths than the oil sector since the start of the invasion three and a half years ago. As many as four top executives from Lukoil, Russia’s largest privately-owned energy company, have died.

Just days after the invasion, Lukoil’s board called for an end to hostilities, expressing “empathy for all victims who are affected by this tragedy” and urging a “settlement of problems through serious negotiations and diplomacy.”

Alexander Subbotin, 43, a billionaire board member of the oil conglomerate, was found dead in the basement of a local shaman in Mytishchi, a city northeast of Moscow, supposedly from toad poisoning — a cure for a hangover he was suffering from.

Then Ravil Maganov, 67, the company’s chairman, died after a six-story plunge from a Moscow hospital window. Vladimir Nekrasov, 66, his replacement, died of acute heart failure soon after, and Vitaly Robertus, 53, the firm’s vice-president, was found dead in his office.

Another oil man, Andrei Badalov, was found dead outside the window of his apartment in the wealthy Moscow suburb of Rublyovka on July 4, in what was called a suicide by state-run media.

Badalov, 62, was vice-president of Transneft, Russia’s largest state-controlled pipeline company – a frequent target of Ukrainian drone attacks since the beginning of the year.

Other Russian observers see the spate of oligarch deaths as a symptom of the chaos and power struggles engulfing Russia’s war-hit economy, battered by sanctions and the rising toll of a war with no end in sight.

“Russia’s business world has become more violent,” said Stanislav Markus, a Russian business expert at the University of South Carolina. “More assets are up for grabs following the withdrawal of Western investors.”

“Putin previously acted as an arbitrator, but now he’s out of it,” said Anders Aslund, Senior Fellow at the Stockholm Free World Forum.

“He sits isolated in his three bunkers, and then people kill each other. There’s a big increase in lawlessness as a result.”