Putin ally found dead with gunshot wound near Moscow

A senior Russian official believed to have had close financial ties to Vladimir Putin was found dead on Tuesday evening.

According to the state news agency, Konstantin Savitsenov’s body was found on Tuesday evening by his son in a country house in Moscow’s Istra district RIA Novosti. Law enforcement officials told the media outlet that the death was tentatively ruled a suicide, but some expressed doubts about that statement.

According to the predominantly pro-Kremlin news website, Zavitsenov, 50, had been on an alcohol binge for “a week and a half” before his death Lenta. His son found a note and alcohol on a table in the house before he heard a gunshot in another room of the house. Lenta also reported that Zavizenov’s wife had recently involved him in an extramarital affair and filed for divorce.

The news of his death was shared by Ukrainian-born racing driver and political commentator Igor Sushko, who expressed skepticism about the claims of Zavizenov’s suicide.

“Konstantin Zavisenov, former minister of fuel, energy and coal industry of the occupied ‘Luhansk People’s Republic’ of Ukraine, was assassinated with a shot to the head in Moscow,” Sushko wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “He was only one degree separated from Putin himself by the Kovalchuk mafia family.

According to the Russian Telegram channel Cheka-OGPU – an underground news source for information about Russian politicians – from 2010 to 2016, Savitsenov served as director of risk management at Inter RAO, an energy holding company headquartered in Moscow.

At the time of Zavizenov’s appointment, the company, one of the country’s largest energy companies, was headed by Boris Kovalchuk, Yuri Kovalchuk’s son.

Kovalchuk is a Russian billionaire, business owner and oligarch. Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar, who has criticized the Russian president, described him as “the de facto second man in Russia” and American government-funded Radio Liberty described him as “Putin’s personal banker.”

Zavizenov was previously minister of fuel, energy and coal industry of the Luhansk People’s Republic, an internationally unrecognized separatist region in eastern Ukraine that was created in 2014 after Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution.

As a member of the self-proclaimed government of the oblast, which was annexed by Russia in 2022, Savitsenov was appointed to office in August of the same year and subsequently became involved in separatist activities in the region.

He was also responsible for organizing a referendum on Luhansk’s integration into Russia, according to the sanctions monitoring website OpenSanctions.

Although he was removed from his post in June 2023, his involvement earned him a place on the list of people targeted by the European Union as well as the United Kingdom and several other nations.

Zavizenov was also included in the List of war enablerspublished by the Anti-Corruption Foundation, an organization founded by prominent Putin opposition figure Alexei Navalny, who died in 2023 after being imprisoned in Russia.

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