Introducing: SAD OLIGARCH Season 2

Since January 2022, dozens of Russia's wealthiest oligarchs and power brokers have died suddenly. One was poisoned with frog venom. Two killed their whole families. Several fell out of high windows. Most of the deaths are suspicious. Russia says they're coincidental suicides—that the deceased were simply depressed. We don't think so...

Sad Oligarch is an investigative podcast series that looks into the strange deaths of the Russian elite, unravelling a dark tale of Kremlin corruption and Putin's political dictatorship across the world. This is season two—Russian oligarchs are still dying and things have gotten even weirder...

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
On February twenty fourth, twenty twenty two, Russian forces crossed
over the border into Ukraine with heavy weapons and armored vehicles.
This was stage one of Putin's full scale invasion of Ukraine.
His plan was to quickly sweep across the country and
take the capital of Kiev. It didn't quite go like that,

(00:28):
though Ukrainians fought back. They formed volunteer militia forces, backed
top the military, and campaigned for better weapons from the West.
Three years into the war and Russia is still nowhere
near Kiev. Thousands have died on the battlefield and civilian
infrastructure is targeted every week, but still Ukraine is holding strong.

(00:53):
As is the case with any war, peculiar things began
to happen after the invasion. Anti Putin. Russian saboteurs got
to work inside Russia. The Kremlin sought to disrupt Europe
through criminal gangs and black market weapons dealing went into overdrive.
Something that caught my eye in particular, though, was a

(01:14):
little bit stranger than all of this. I noticed that
there was a verst number of Russian oligarchs who started
falling out of windows. If it was a windows, it
was some other clumsy or extremely violent death. So I
got in touch with my friend and colleague, Sergei Slipchenkov.

(01:37):
He's a Ukrainian journalist who speaks both Russian and English fluently.
We'd been on the ground at working in Kiev the
week of the invasion. He agreed, as to many other
journalists at the time, that this was really weird. Together,
we dug deeper into the deaths of these rich Russian
power brokers. What we found was an unprecedented number of accidents, suicides,

(02:02):
and violent murders, sending oligarchs to their grave. Now, we
don't particularly care if some Russian oligarch dies, but to
understand these weird kremlinink deaths is to proper understand Putin
and what he's up to. It was clear a pattern
was emerging and we wanted to document it, and so

(02:24):
sad Oligarch was born. Since we finished season one, the
millionaires and billionaires keep dropping like flies. So get ready
for sad Oligarch Season two, an investigative podcast that focuses
on the mysterious deaths of Russia's Kremlin linked power brokers.

(02:47):
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