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they really need to make the windows in tall Russian buildings un-openable.
Then they would have an unusual amount of people 'jumping' off the roof instead.
 
They don’t just fall out of windows. When I was sub contracting for a British Engineering firm in Moscow, back in the 1990’s, the head of the Russian operation was found dead in his flat where a fire had been started. At first it was reported that there were no suspicious circumstances but it later transpired that there were three different fires that had started in the apartment but none had taken hold.
He had been complaining, quit loudly in a bar, that a very senior man in the Moscow local government had stiffed his company for a substantial amount of work they had carried out.
Couldn't find a lot now on the internet other than an early report of his death with no suspicious circumstances.

I won’t mention the Russian he was unhappy with; whilst I live in a bungalow I could easily fall out of one the ground floor windows and accidentally stab myself or shoot myself twice with a loaded shotgun in the fall.

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news...-in-moscow-fire-being-treated-as-an-accident/
 
The chairman of Russia's Lukoil oil giant, Ravil Maganov, has died after falling from a hospital window in Moscow, reports say. ...

No window (porthole?) involved here, but this most recent mysterious death of a Putin insider / industrialist did involve a plunge - into the icy waters of the northern Pacific.
Seventh Putin pal dies in months after 'mysterious plunge from boat'

Another high-ranking Russian industrialist has died following an unexplained accident.

Ivan Pechorin, hand-picked by leader Vladimir Putin to head up the development of natural resources in Russia ’s Arctic territories, apparently fell overboard while sailing his private yacht off the country’s Pacific coast. ...

Pechorin, 39, is the latest senior official linked to Russia’s energy sector and the Kremlin to die in suspicious circumstances. ...

He reportedly fell off the side of a boat in the waters close to Russky Island near Cape Ignatiev, said Komsomolskaya Pravda.

His body was found after a search lasting more than a day.
FULL STORY: https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/seventh-putin-pal-dies-months-27974708
 
Hardly surprising.
Considering the unexpected suicide or completely not-suspicious deaths concerning Putin's opponents and detractors, the current war in Ukraine has certainly dusted off some cobwebs when it comes to procurement funds in the Kremlin.
I'd suggest that since the invasion didn't go swimmingly as he expected, he's now looking pointedly at those Generals and senior apparatchicks who constantly bragged how the Russian military had all the up-to-date gear, only to find that the maintenance budget seems to have been a few rouble's short.
The Russian oligarchs might be aggrieved at the Western sanctions but they now must be a tad wary if Putin's calling in all the favours.
 
only to find that the maintenance budget seems to have been a few rouble's short.
Are you suggesting that some of the budget was siphoned off into (ahem) 'private accounts' and when they showed Putin the tanks that they were just cardboard-cut-outs of tanks?
 
E.G.
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Are you suggesting that some of the budget was siphoned off into (ahem) 'private accounts' and when they showed Putin the tanks that they were just cardboard-cut-outs of tanks?
Well, 'received wisdom' up until the invasion - including Western thought - was that Russia had superiority in materiel as well as in numbers. Yup, they have the cannon fodder ... er ... population to throw into battle, but it looks like the logistics is thin on the ground and the actual doctrine is woeful concerning use of combined forces.
Perhaps Vlad was lacking in up to date, real information and was relying on a traditional perception of might.

Less cardboard tanks, more big tanks that look okay in a parade, but are rusting inside and are good enough to grind past the viewing platform before going around the corner and breaking down.
 
Has anyone researched to see if Russia has a greater gravitational pull than other countries? I mean it is the largest country after all.
 
Amen.

As of 0740 / 14.9.22, Russia has lost (destroyed, captured, abandoned) 1,112 tanks according to the authoritative Oryx blog.

maximus otter
That's a lot of firepower, especially as it only lists confirmed losses; the actual figure will be much higher.

Considering that Putin apparently thought the 'Special Military Operation' would be over in three days, it doesn't reflect well on Russia's armed forces, or its intelligence, or both.

That said, I'm very fearful about what the next few months/years might bring.
 
What your forgetting though is that the Russian forces would not commit their best people and equipment to a 'military operation' that was initially expected to be over within a few weeks at most.
No, their initial forces would have been the less able foot-soldiers and the oldest tanks etc.
You send in the 'better' lot much later on.
 
Whether this is an accident or variation on a theme... No windows involved - he apparently drowned.

Russian businessman's body found in latest mysterious death

Russian businessman Ivan Pechorin, the top manager for the Corporation for the Development of the Far East and the Arctic, has been found dead in Vladivostok, the latest in a string of mysterious deaths among Russian executives.

According to Russian state media outlet RIA Novosti, the administration of Vladivostok said a body was found near the village of Beregovoe. Pechorin drowned on September 10 near Cape Ignatyev in Vladivostok, regional media reports.

Pechorin is at least the ninth prominent Russian businessmen to have reportedly died by suicide or in unexplained accidents since late January, with six of them associated with Russia's two largest energy companies.

Four of those six were linked to the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom or one of its subsidiaries, while the other two were associated with Lukoil, Russia's largest privately owned oil and gas company.
 
A senior aviation expert and former head of the Moscow Aviation Institute has died from a mysterious fall within the institute's headquarters building. The fall seems to have involved tumbling down multiple flights of stairs.
Ex-Putin Ally Plunges to His Death ‘From a Great Height’ at Moscow Aviation Institute

An aviation expert has become the latest Russian official to fall to his death in mysterious circumstances.

Anatoly Gerashchenko, the former head of Moscow’s Aviation Institute (MAI), died in a mysterious fall inside the institute’s headquarters in the Russian capital on Tuesday.

The organization’s press office released a statement describing the 73-year-old’s death as “the result of an accident,” adding that his untimely demise was a “a colossal loss for the MAI and the scientific and pedagogical community.”

Russian news outlet Izvestia, citing an unnamed source, reported that Gerashchenko “fell from a great height” and careened down several flights of stairs. He was reportedly pronounced dead at the scene. ...
FULL STORY: https://www.thedailybeast.com/russi...o-falls-to-his-death-in-latest-plunge-mystery
 
One note of caution here (aside from don’t go near a window if you’ve annoyed a Russian dictator): It's worth keeping in mind that favoured methods of suicide do vary somewhat between cultures. For instance, although jumping to one’s death is pretty rare in the US and Western Europe, it's a common method in Hong Kong (This medical paper suggests just over 48% (in the years 2002 to 2007) - Wiki suggests even higher (no pun intended) at 52%.

Also, although I doubt there's any question that forcible defenestration has been used as a method of assassination, I'm not entirely sure about the practicalities of its widespread application - at least, not in any covert sense. For a start, I don’t think it would be feasible without involving a whole team of assassins. It‘s not unknown for it to take four or five burly peelers to safely subdue and restrain a particularly recalcitrant scallywag, and these individuals aren't (generally) expecting to be killed; heaven knows how much more effort would be needed if the person involved knew that they were fighting for their lives. It would of course be different if the victim were restrained or incapacitated, but evidence of this is likely to show up. Within the nation that sponsors the killing, I dare say any post mortem evidence can be subverted, but on an international level, this would clearly be problematic. I do wonder if psychological force might be used in overseas cases - as in threats against family back in Russia.

I’m in two minds about the subject. I’m not saying no – just being circumspect. It’s worth pointing out that myths around suicide regularly contribute to accusations of conspiracy: the two most obvious being the lack of a suicide letter (nowhere near as ubiquitous as commonly held) and the implication that any hanging where part of the body is found touching the ground in a way which would have aided the victim to support themselves is suspicious (actually quite common).
 
This new Vox article provides an overview of past and current clusters of mysterious high-profile Russians' deaths, a listing of the most recent series of incidents, and commentary from academics specialized in Russian studies.
Russian businessmen keep dying. No one knows why.

It’s a rough year to be a high-profile Russian: After nearly eight months of war in Ukraine, the Russian military is reeling and on its back foot; sanctions continue to squeeze the country’s economy and elite — and at least 15 Russian businessmen and executives have died in apparent accidents or by suicide, including a number of Putin allies.

The victims range from an executive with Gazprom, a major state-owned oil company, to the managing director of a state-run development corporation. The causes of death range from unremarkable — a stroke, for example — to lurid, such as death by toad poison in a shaman’s basement.

Combined, the sheer number of deaths, as well as the prominence of the dead and a long history of suspicious demises in Putin’s Russia, have raised questions about whether something other than ordinary bad luck is at fault.

According to Stanislav Markus, an associate professor at the University of South Carolina business school and author of Property, Predation, and Protection: Piranha Capitalism in Russia and Ukraine, it’s a near certainty. “We can almost certainly rule out the official explanation of the deaths as suicides or poor health,” Markus told me via email. He’s not alone; theories vary — and generally don’t feature some grand conspiracy by the Kremlin — but a number of Russia experts see “more than just randomness” in the deaths, as Syracuse University professor Brian Taylor, who specializes in Russian politics and is the author of The Code of Putinism, put it to me in an interview. ...

In several cases, the family and friends of the dead have already raised questions about their deaths, or rejected official conclusions of suicide. ...

There’s something to these suspicions — political assassinations, after all, aren’t exactly unusual in Russia. ...

As recently as two years ago, Alex Ward highlighted a similar trend in a different sector of Russian society in a story for Vox: coronavirus doctors dying after falling from high windows early in the pandemic. Those deaths were equally unexplained, but as Ward wrote at the time, murder “may not be completely out of the question.”

That ambiguity is a common theme around deaths in Russia; though there is rarely clear-cut evidence, questions surrounding the deaths of Putin critics stretch back nearly two decades. ...

“The number of [deaths] seems higher than random chance would suggest, but that doesn’t mean that it’s all part of the same story,” Taylor said. “Some of them really could be suicides or accidents. Some of them could be murders.” ...

Additionally, according to Peter Rutland, a Russia expert and professor of government at Wesleyan University, Russia’s system, and perhaps especially its business community, is under substantial pressure due to the war. ...

That leaves a third theory, one that both Taylor and Rutland indicate is far more likely than either a Kremlin-directed campaign of assassinations or a spate of genuine accidents and suicides.

Specifically, the recent run of deaths among Russia’s business elite could well be disguised killings — but the killings may be a product of Russia’s tangled political and economic structures, which are newly under pressure from Russia’s war in Ukraine, more than of any specific, overarching agenda. ...
FULL STORY: https://www.vox.com/world/2022/10/1...putin-mysterious-deaths-windows?ICID=ref_fark
 

Russian colonel involved in Putin's mobilisation campaign is found shot dead in mysterious circumstances

Colonel Vadim Boyko, 44, was found with 'multiple bullet wounds' inside his office at the prestigious Makarov Pacific Higher Naval School in Vladivostok today.

Witnesses said Colonel Boyko had come to work and walked into his office before 'five shots' were heard. A subordinate ran to investigate, and found the body.

Despite the witness claims of multiple shots, initial reports in Russia said that suicide was suspected.

But BAZA media - which has close law enforcement links - said criminal investigators had found five shell casings and four Makarov pistols beside the dead colonel.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...ation-campaign-shot-dead-military-school.html

maximus otter
 
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