The death of Roman Starovoit, who killed himself on July 7, only hours after being fired by Russian President Vladimir Putin as Russia’s transport minister, has spurred fresh talk of the life-threatening dangers of working for the Russian government. There have been thirteen sudden deaths of Russian energy and transportation executives since 2022, Meduza reports.

Starovoit was found dead from a gunshot wound in the back of his car, in what officials have described as an apparent suicide. It is ther first time in modern hisotry that a serving minister has killed himself. Starovoit's motivation for taking his own life remains unclear. Some have speculated it was simply remorse, but the former governor of the Kursk region has also been linked to corruption investigations into the misuse of public funds to build fortifications while he was running the region that borders Ukraine and was invaded by Ukraine's armed forces last summer.

The death of Starovoit only adds to suspicions that some high ranking Russian officials are routinely murdered by the powers that be in Putin’s Russia. The Russian outlet Meduza reports that a total of thirteen officials and managers of state-owned enterprises have died suddenly since the start of the war, with defenestration being a surprisingly frequent cause of death. Standing next to a window seems to be a dangerous thing to do in Russia if you run a big company.

No official statement has yet been released by the Investigative Committee of Russia, though anonymous law enforcement sources told Russian news outlets that the case is being treated as a suicide. A pistol was reportedly found near the body, though no further details have been confirmed, reported Meduza.

“The full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been an unusually dangerous time for Russian officials and senior executives responsible for state and private oil and gas companies. Death has claimed top managers at corporations such as Gazprom, Lukoil, and Transneft,” Meduza reports.

Below is a list of deaths published by Meduza:

January 2022: Leonid Shulman, head of the transport service for Gazprom Invest, was found dead in the bathtub of his country house in an affluent neighbourhood outside St. Petersburg.

February 2022: Alexander Tyulyakov, deputy director of Gazprom’s Unified Settlement Center for Corporate Security, was found hanged in the garage of his house in a cottage settlement outside St. Petersburg.

April 2022: Vladislav Avaev, vice president of Gazprombank, was found shot dead in his Moscow apartment. The bodies of his wife and their young daughter were discovered nearby, shot to death, by a surviving daughter. Investigators said the doors to the apartment were locked from the inside, and no sign of forced entry was found.

April 2022: Sergey Protosenya, former top manager of Novatek, was found dead at his villa in Spain. The bodies of his wife and teenage daughter were found in their beds, having been brutally murdered with an axe and a knife.

May 2022: Alexander Subbotin, a former member of Lukoil’s board of directors, was found dead in Mytishchi, a city outside Moscow in the basement of a private residence reportedly belonging to a self-styled shaman who provided alternative medical treatments. According to Russian news agencies, Subbotin had visited the residence seeking treatment for hangover-related symptoms involving toad venom therapy.

Preliminary reports attributed the death to acute heart failure.

July 2022: Yuri Voronov, founder of Astra-Shipping (a Gazprom subcontractor), was found dead in a swimming pool in a cottage settlement in Leningrad Region with a gunshot wound to the head.

August 2022: Ravil Maganov, chairman of Lukoil’s board of directors, fell from a window at a hospital in Moscow where he was undergoing treatment, a death Russian authorities described as suicide.

December 2022: Oleg Zatsepin, general director of Kogalymneftegaz (a Lukoil subsidiary in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous District), was found dead in his office.

February 2023: Vyacheslav Rovneyko, co-founder of Urals Energy, an oil businessman from the late 1990s, and former business partner of Boris Yeltsin’s son-in-law, was found dead in his house on Rublyovskoye Highway, Moscow’s most exclusive residential area.

October 2023: Vladimir Nekrasov, chairman of Lukoil’s board of directors, died of acute heart failure.

March 2024: Vitaly Robertus, vice president of Lukoil, was found dead in his Moscow office. The cause of death was not officially disclosed by the company or Russian authorities.

July 2025: Andrey Badalov, vice president of Transneft, fell from the window of his apartment on Rublyovskoye Highway in Moscow.

July 2025: Roman Starovoit, dismissed from his position as Russia’s transportation minister, took his own life in a parking lot outside Moscow.