From Russia With Blood: How Much Do You Really Know About Vladimir Putin, Part 2

A glimpse inside the mind of a monster.

This article is Part 2 of a two part series. Part 1 was posted yesterday, April 25, 2PM Eastern Time, and can be read here.

Five or so years ago, I ghostwrote a book about a serial killer, and it made me absolutely miserable. I hated returning to such a grim subject day after day, spelunking around inside the mind of a man so shockingly depraved, he had congress with his dead victims. The evening I was able to attach the final draft to an email and send it to my client, I celebrated with a big bowl of popcorn and a three hour, palate-cleansing Buffy marathon. That’s just how I roll.

Writing on the subject of Vladimir Putin’s poisonings, shootings, hangings, and stabbings has left me with the same feeling of bleak despair. How was somebody like Putin allowed to continue as ruler of Russia? Of course, the U.S. couldn’t have acted unilaterally in Putin’s overthrow, but the international community might have done more than it did, which was nothing. Globally, we are too dependent on Russian oil—and Russian money—to inconvenience ourselves by following up on a string of extrajudicial murders.

Meanwhile, Putin is perfecting a host of poisons and nerve-agents, including virtually untraceable ones that bring on heart attacks or render a victim so morosely depressed, their “suicide” never rouses suspicions, even amongst their loved ones.

Yesterday, I gave a précis on a few of his assumed victims. Today, I would like to do the same, in hope that seeing some of his victims on a single page will deliver more of a gut punch than reading about each of them individually.

There have been four recent 'suicides' of high profile Russian gas industry executives these past months with links to Vladimir Putin. All the circumstances are suspicious, but what’s especially concerning is the brutality of the attacks, which appear to be in the nature of a warning. It’s almost as though Putin wants the world to know what he is capable of: cross him, and you and your family will suffer a similar fate.

1. Last Tuesday, the body of Sergei Protosenya, a businessman worth 423 million dollars who served as deputy chairman of Kremlin-linked natural gas company Novotek, was found hanged at his Spanish villa. His wife, Natalia, and their teenage daughter, Maria, were hacked to death with an axe. The murder scene had been choreographed to make it seem as though Sergei chopped them up first before hanging himself, but no finger prints were found on the murder weapon, nor was there a suicide note. U.S. officials widely believe that the Protosenyas were assassinated by order of Vladimir Putin.

Sergei Protosenya, his wife and daughter, all dead.

2. Less than 48 hours later, in what appeared to be another murder-suicide, the body of Vladislav Avayev, former vice-president of Russian lender Gazprombank, was found shot to death alongside the bodies of his wife and thirteen-year-old daughter in the family’s luxurious Moscow apartment.

Vladislav Avayev, dead. Also dead, but not shown, his wife and daughter.

3. In January of this year, Leonid Shulman, the head of the Gazprom Invest transport service, was found dead in the bathroom of his house. In a note found next to the body, Shulman complained of pain in his broken leg. For a man who appeared to be so pain-averse, it is a mystery how he found the courage (and dexterity) to slash both wrists.

Leonid Shulman, “suicide.”

4. On February 25, 2022, Gazprom former deputy Alexander Tyulyakov was found hanging in a garage near St. Petersburg. As is typical in cases involving current or former officials working for state-owned Gazprom, Gazprom security units arrived on scene right when the police did. U.S. intelligence says that all four deaths of Russian officials this year were staged to look like suicides or murder-suicides.

Alexander Tyulyakov, “suicide.”

5. Gelsemium, a flower native to China, also known as “heartbreak grass,” causes cardiac arrest if its leaves are ingested. Traces of it were found in exiled Russian banker Alexander Perepilichnyy, found lying on a road in a fetal position, by chef Neil St. Clair-Ford, who was driving through Weybridge in Surrey on November 2012. St. Clair-Ford stopped to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and was astonished when Perepilichnyy repeatedly vomited “greeny-yellow bile” into his mouth, a taste St. Clair-Ford equated to “licking a car battery.”

"We strongly believe that Perepilichnyy was assassinated on direct orders from Putin or people close to him."
– Senior US intelligence official

Perepilichnyy allegedly helped Kremlin-connected Russians launder money, but in 2010, he fled to the U.K. and began cooperating with British authorities. He collapsed during a run, which is how St. Clair-Ford discovered him.

Initial toxicology reports revealed nothing suspicious, but later tests performed by an expert botanist showed the presence of a deadly plant toxin in Perepilichnyy’s stomach: Gelsemium.

Alexander Perepilichnyy, “heart attack.”

6. On March 4, 2018, former Russian military officer and double agent for British intelligence, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter, Yulia Skripal, were found slumped on a bench in Salisbury, England. Both had been poisoned by a Russian nerve agent called Nokichok and spent several weeks in a critical care unit. Fortunately, they survived.

One British national was not so lucky. Just a few months later, on June 30, there was a similar poisoning in nearby Amesbury. A homeless man named Charlie Rowley found a perfume bottle in the trash and gave it to his partner, Dawn Sturgess, who sprayed its contents on her wrist, having no idea the bottle contained Nokichok and had been used in an assassination attempt on the Skripals.

Rowley survived, but Sturgess did not, falling ill within 15 minutes and dying shortly thereafter. An investigation revealed that three officers in Russian military intelligence—highly decorated GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga, GRU operative Alexander Mushkin, and GRU major general Denis Vyacheslavovich Sergeev—carried out the assassination attempt by order of Major General Andrei V. Averyanov.

Averyanov is widely believed to answer directly to Vladimir Putin.

Yulia Skripal and her father Sergei, poisoned but survived.

7. One of the few Putin opponents to have survived poisoning is lawyer and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, who was evacuated to Berlin in August of 2020 after he fell ill on a flight to Moscow. Experts believe he’d been poisoned by the nerve agent Nokichok, which caused him to lapse into a coma.

Navalny told investigators that before falling ill he’d gone down to the lobby bar in his hotel and ordered a Bloody Mary. “The bartender surprised him by saying they didn’t have the necessary ingredients and offered a Negroni cocktail instead,” investigators wrote in their report. But apparently, the drink was so bitter, Navalny only took a sip and left the rest, a decision which may have saved his life.

In yet another bizarre confluence of circumstances, Navalny later fooled one of his would-be assassins into confessing to the poisoning over the phone. The assassin, believing he was speaking to an associate, said that agents had broken into Navalny’s hotel room and sprayed Novichok into a pair of his underpants.

Navalny survived his assassination attempt only to find himself in a “corrective labor colony” in Russia after a conviction for dangerous extremism in one of Russia’s infamous kangaroo courts.

Alexei Navalny, poisoned but survived.

8. On August 16, 2010, Welsh mathematician and M16 (British spy agency) member Gareth Wyn Williams was discovered inside a sports bag, padlocked from the outside, at his flat in Central London. Two senior British police sources have said that Williams’ work was focused on Russia, specifically tracing international money-laundering routes that are commonly used by Moscovian mafia networks.

Gareth Williams, “suicide.”

At the time of his death, however, British authorities quickly shut down the investigation, deeming it “nonsuspicious,” despite finding no fingerprints anywhere in the flat, including Williams’ own. Why the British government refuses to refer these cases for criminal prosecution remains a mystery to this day, but likely has to do with the fact that a disproportionate amount of their post-Brexit economy depends on laundering dirty Russian money.

9. In 2017, outside the Premier Palace, a luxury hotel in Kiev, former Russian MP Denis Voronenkov was shot dead hours before he was set to testify against the pro-Putin Prime Minister of Russia. The attacker and Voronenkov's bodyguard were both injured in an exchange of gunfire and taken to hospital. According to police, the killer later died.

Denis Voronenko, dead.

10. Mikhail Lesin, former Russian press minister and creator of English language/Kremlin propaganda arm, Russia Today (RT) died of blunt force trauma to the head in a Washington hotel room in 2017.

Reportedly, Lesin was considering making a deal with the FBI shortly before his death in order to avoid corruption charges. According to a BuzzFeed article on the subject, an FBI agent is quoted as saying, “Lesin was beaten to death. There seems to be an effort here to cover up that fact for reasons I can’t get into.”

Mikhail Lesin, dead.

If you’re ready for a real shock to the system, take a look at this list of over 140 journalists who have been killed in Russia during the Putin years. No disrespect is intended by not listing each one by name, but there are so many, I don’t have room to fit them into a single post.

At this point, you may well be wondering, why should we care what Putin does? If he wants to kill a few oligarchs, off a few journos, what’s that to us? As a fellow human being on this planet, I would hope that the mere fact of gross injustices being perpetrated against other humans might be reason enough to care. But if that’s not the case, let me make another point.

If Donald Trump gets back into office in 2024, and there is a very good chance that he will, given Biden’s unpopularity (high gas prices and an exorbitant cost of living do not a reelection make), we’re going to be right back in bed with Vladimir V. Putin. Republicans don’t materially care about the genocide Putin is responsible for in Ukraine. Most have no interest in investigating Trump’s numerous ties to Russia. They don’t value human rights, the law, or much of anything these days except avoiding the gay, controlling uteri, or banning critical race theory. But they like power. They want all of it for themselves. Gone are the days when Republicans even gave lip service to the preservation of democracy.

Trump is a huge admirer of Putin’s. First item on his second-term docket: an amendment, passed unanimously by a Republican Senate majority and perhaps even the House, extending presidential term limits—just like the one that’s kept Putin in power for eighteen years. After Trump dies, he will “bequeath” the presidency to one of his children or possibly his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Even House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi warned that a second term of Donald Trump’s presidency would wreak “irreparable damage” upon the country.

That wasn’t partisan bickering. It’s the truth.

Which is why we need to pay very close attention to the actions of Vladimir Putin. If mass graves, chemical bombs, genocide, the raping of Ukrainian women and the killing of Ukrainian children aren’t enough to get us to set down our smartphones and pick up a protest sign, maybe knowing that this trail of carnage will eventually lead to our doors will rouse us from our slumbers. What happens in Russia could happen anywhere, even the United States, if enough people remain silent, or fail to stem a very dark tide.

As always, I am looking forward to hearing from you. Feel free to leave your comments. If you like this article, share this article. The more people who know, the better.

Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin