According to reports, a Russian oil tycoon and former spy close to Vladimir Putin’s director of foreign intelligence was discovered dead in his gated community.
Doctors unsuccessfully attempted to save Viatcheslav Rovneiko, 59, after he was “found unconscious” late last night. An investigation into his alleged demise is currently underway.
According to a report from the Moscow-based daily newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets, “no signs of a violent death were found on his body.”
Rovneiko is thought to have been a KGB spy from the Cold War era who collaborated with Sergei Naryshkin, who is currently in charge of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, in Belgium.
Additionally, he is said to have known billionaire Gennady Timchenko, one of Putin’s most devoted oligarchs.
Leonid Dyachenko, whose then-wife Tatiana was the influential daughter of President Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first president, was Rovneiko’s former business partner.
He co-founded Urals Energy, one of many significant oil companies, with another person.
In 2005, the company went public in London.
According to reports, he had business ties to Cyprus, Britain, Belgium, and Luxembourg.
He reportedly had a Belgian passport in 2006.
Rovneiko had attended the prestigious Institute of International Relations [MGIMO] in Moscow, which served as a spies’ and diplomats’ training ground.
The former spy was depicted in Russian business databases as a faceless man with a reputation for extreme secrecy.
He was married to 63-year-old Irina, a fellow MGIMO student, and their 40-year-old son Nikolay attended Kingston University and worked as an investment banker in London.
It follows the discovery of Marina Yankina, 58, by a bystander at the front door of a home in St. Petersburg, where it is thought that she died after falling 160 feet.
Yankina oversaw a Kremlin division that was in charge of raising money for the Ministry of Defense, particularly in relation to the conflict in Ukraine.
Suspicious deaths are nothing new in Russia; between 2014 and 2017, 38 Russian businessmen and oligarchs close to the Kremlin passed away in mysterious or suspicious circumstances, according to
The term “Sudden Russian Death Syndrome” is used to describe this phenomenon.
More deaths have occurred recently.
After managing the largest foreign investment company in Russia for ten years, Bill Browder was expelled from Russia in 2005 due to concerns for Russian national security.
The American-born British financier claimed that the bizarre string of “suicides” is actually the result of a conflict between rival Kremlin insiders in a speech before November’s Magnitsky Human Rights Awards in London.
