The mysterious and mounting deaths of Putin's allies turned critics
News that former Kremlin aide Mikhail Lesin, who was found dead in Washington in November, died from "blunt force injuries to the head" has thrust the mystery surrounding his death back into the spotlight. It has also fueled conspiracy theories about who might have wanted him dead.
Beverly Fields of the office of the chief medical examiner in D.C. confirmed Lesin's cause of death to Mashable by phone on Thursday. Fields said Lesin also sustained "blunt force injuries of the neck, torso, upper extremities and lower extremities."
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The revelation from the medical examiner came as a shock to the public four months after Lesin's death, because Russian media previously reported that the former communications minister and founder of the Kremlin-directed Russia Today (RT) news agency had died from a heart attack.
And the plot thickened late Thursday with one U.S. official apparently telling The New York Times that Lesin's wounds came from an altercation that happened before he staggered back to his hotel room that night.
On Friday, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty uncovered another wrinkle, reporting that Lesin had confirmed his attendance at an event in the U.S. capital 48 hours earlier, but he never showed.
The official "manner of death" in Lesin's case is "undetermined."
It is still unclear what exactly happened to Lesin in Washington. As of now, the official "manner of death" is "undetermined," according to the medical examiner. An investigation is ongoing.
The absence of detail in the case of his death has conspiracy theorists talking.
Theories ranges from an FBI cover up in which the death was faked so Lesin could be put into witness protection to help U.S. authorities with Russia-related investigations, to the Kremlin had him killed because he knew too much about the government's inner workings.
A U.S. senator had asked the Justice Department to investigate Lesin, who he suspected of using dirty money to buy pricey California real estate. The request was later referred to the Justice Department's criminal division and the FBI, but it's not known whether a case was opened.
Were they closing in? Had Lesin talked with them?
Russia doesn't take kindly to to those who talk to foreigners about what happens behind the big red walls of the Kremlin. Putin himself has called such people "traitors" and "enemies." And some of them have turned up dead.
A series of mysterious deaths
Lesin was not the only Russian with close ties to President Vladimir Putin, Russia's government or its security services who has died under mysterious circumstances.
At least three other high-profile Russian men met similarly murky fates that spawned wild speculation, and at least one was proven to have been an elaborate assassination likely ordered by Putin himself.
The spy turned informer: Alexander Litvinenko
The most infamous case involves Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian Federal Security Services (FSB) turned dissident, MI6 consultant and Kremlin critic who fled his motherland for London in 2000.
Litvinenko, 44, was said to be spilling secrets to the British and wrote a book, "Blowing Up Russia," in which he suggested that Russian security services were behind a series of apartment bombings in 1999 that had killed more than 300 people.
On Nov. 1, 2006, Litvinenko mets with Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, also Russian ex-spies, at the Pine Bar inside London's Millennium Hotel.
It's there, according to a British inquiry released in January, that he unknowingly drank a fatal dose of Polonium-210 that one of the men had slipped into his tea.
After a lengthy investigation, the British inquiry found that Putin himself "probably approved" an FSB plan to kill Litvinenko.
The oligarch turned critic: Boris Berezovsky
The colorful and complicated Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, 67, was found hanged at his mansion outside London on March 23, 2013.
A self-made billionaire who came up in the turbulent post-Soviet 1990s, he was an integral player in Putin's rise to power in 2000. But once elected president, Putin turned on him, as well as other oligarchs, charging many with tax evasion.
Berezovksy was one of them. In 2000, he fled to England, where taunted Putin and what he called the president's "major crimes in Russia" from afar.
Life got harder for the billionaire. His fortune disappeared, and then, broke and alone, his body was discovered hanging in a bathroom.
The Thames Valley Police reported that Berezovsky was found with "a ligature around his neck and a piece of similar material on the shower rail above him." The department said the death was "consistent with hanging."
But there was no suicide note, and police said the involvement of a second party "cannot be completely eliminated, as tests remain outstanding." That has led many to believe there was foul play.
The whistleblower: Alexander Perepilichnyy
Alexander Perepilichnyy, 44, moved with his wife and two children to the England in 2009. He had worked as a currency trader in Moscow, where it's reported he lost a substantial amount of his own and other people's money in the financial crash of 2008.
Several of his former business associates told the BBC he was getting death threats and believed he was on a "hit list" as a result.
In England, he was helping with an investigation into a multimillion dollar money laundering operation involving Russian officials when he collapsed while jogging near his home in November 2012.
Police insisted there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding his sudden death, despite the fact he appeared to be in fine health.
But later traces of a chemical found in a poisonous plant, Gelsemium elegans, were found in his stomach, bearing similarities to the Litvinenko case and raising the suspicion of foul play. The plant has been used as a deadly weapon by both Chinese and Russian assassins, according to The Guardian.
Hermitage Capital Management, the company that led the fraud investigation, told an inquiry in Longon that it believes Perepilichnyy may have been deliberately killed by Russian security services for his role in the case.
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Christopher is Mashable's Senior Correspondent covering world news, particularly the post-Soviet space and especially Ukraine, where he lived and worked for more than five years. As an editor at Ukraine's Kyiv Post newspaper, Christopher was part of the team that won the 2014 Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism for coverage of the Euromaidan Revolution, Russia's annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine. Besides Mashable, he has published with The Telegraph, The Times, The Independent and GlobalPost from such countries as Greece, Italy, Israel, Russia and Turkey, among others, as well as from aboard a search and rescue ship off the Libyan coast. Originally from rainy Portland, Oregon, he is also a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Ukraine) currently based in New York.
