Another "Apparent" Russian Suicide

"Normal people cannot but be shocked by this. Of course, this shocked us, too."

"It's up to the investigation to provide answers to all the questions. While it's ongoing, one can only speculate."

"But that's more for the media and political pundits. Not for us."

Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov

 

"The most dramatic part of this, with all the re-Stalinisation that has been happening in Russia in recent years, is that a high-level government official [kills himself] because he has no other way of getting out of the system." 

"He must have feared that he would receive tens of years in prison if he was going to be under investigation, and that his family would suffer tremendously. So, there's no way out."

"I Immediately thought of Sergo Ordzhonikidze, one of Stalin's ministers, who [killed himself] in 1937 because he felt there was no way out. When you start thinking of 1937 in today's environment that gives you great pause."

"Unlike before, when you could get these jobs, get rich, get promoted from regional level to federal level, today, that is clearly not a career path if you want to stay alive."

"There's not only no upward mobility to start with, but even downward mobility ends with death."

Nina Khrushcheva, professor of International Affairs, The New School, New York  

Roman Starovoit, Photo: EPA

"The Kremlin is accustomed to treating officials as expendable: today they work, tomorrow we'll lock them up and find someone else."

"By taking his own life, Starovoit broke these rules."

"He disobeyed Putin and, instead of meekly going to prison, chose to shoot himself."

Independent journalist Farida Rustamova

 

"It is interesting that the current round of political evolution of the regime is more detrimental to the elites than to the taxable class — usually it is the other way around." 

"At what point will these unfortunate people realize that the answer is not to find the most harmless tsar possible, but to establish mandatory rules for everyone, called the law?"

Political analyst Ekaterina Schulmann   

Odd that none of these insiders that know the Kremlin inside-out and are generally fervent critics of Russia's would-be czar, Vladimir Putin -- who has been hard at work resurrecting Stalin's image as a great dictator, and who yearns for the return of the power and influence of the Soviet Union to the extent that he has cast his acquisitive eye on domination of former satellites of the USSR, with the full intention of capturing them once again in the union of Soviet Socialist Republics -- have not speculated on the not-so-remote possibility that Mr. Starovoit, out of favour with Putin, was murdered.

 

In fact, high-placed 'allies' of President Putin have been caught for the past number of years in a suspicious net of infectious suicides, which if investigated a little more deeply, reveal they did not leap out of a window in despair over lost positions and prestige, but were involuntarily 'defenestrated', just as many reported to have hanged themselves were instead victims of staged suicide hangings, and the same with committing suicide by aiming revolver to the most sensitive of human organs, the brain or the heart.

 

And is anyone really 'surprised' at this death, the former transport minister whose position was suddenly yanked out from under him, committing an 'apparent' suicide according to Russian investigators? Found in his car with a gunshot wound, the gun itself having been an 'official gift'. Investigators who know better than to really 'investigate' a situation that bears no scrutiny should one care about one's own future as a living, breathing specimen of enduring the unendurable. It was announced that this suicide occurred following his dismissal as transport minister, by President Putin. 

 

A dismissal that the Kremlin made public following the cancellation of hundreds of flights across Russia caused by the mass disruption that occurred with weekend Ukrainian drone attacks. It was, of course, not Starovoit who provoked Ukraine into threatening Russian air travel, but the very man who fired him, who had initiated his infamous 'temporary military invasion' to rid Ukraine of its neo-Nazi influencers. Mutual chaos ensued as Russia and Ukraine struck each other with hundreds of long-range drones on Sunday.  

 

Russian President Vladimir Putin is pictured meeting Roman Starovoit on January 30, 2025 in the Kremlin.  Photo: Kremlin

 

Russian media have linked the dismissal of the travel minister with a probe on embezzlement of state funds meant to build fortifications in the Kursk region, where the Kursk-born Starovoit served as governor at the pleasure of Mr. Putin. Embezzlement is being used by the Kremlin to explain away the huge embarrassment of Ukraine's counter-incursion by its mechanized units to overwhelm the comparatively ill-trained and lightly armed Russian border guards. And although Moscow claims to have retaken the Kursk territory that Ukraine held since August 2024, that is not quite so, since Ukraine continues to hold a smaller area of Russian territory in Kursk. 

 

The humiliation felt by the Kremlin over the much smaller Ukrainian military, able to out-smart, out-manoeuvre and challenge Russia's much larger and more fulsomely equipped military to the extent that Putin's original plan to stomp all over Ukraine, take what it wanted in territory, then leave on a self-aggrandizement note of territorial imperative rewarded but blocked by Ukraine, still rankles and Moscow needs to blame someone's ineptitude as being the cause of its failure.

 

Alleging embezzlement as a reason for the deficiencies inherent in the Russian defensive lines humiliatingly failing to stop the Ukrainian incursion needed a victim to show due cause. The criminal probe launched into the unfortunate 'suicide' of this man will of course, verify investigators' initial cause of death as suicide. Yet an awful lot of high-placed Russian politicians, business elite, journalists and opposition politicians have proven to 'suicide' themselves by annoying or disappointing Vladimir Putin. 

 

Russian Transport Minister Roman Starovoit attends a meeting in Mineralnye Vody, Russia, on May 6, 2025. (Dmitry Astakhov, Sputnik, Government Pool Photo via AP)