Mystery deepens as ex‑Yukos VP's death raises suspicions
Mikhail Rogachev, the former vice president for corporate governance at the Yukos oil company, was found dead on the sidewalk in front of his home. According to local media, he allegedly fell out of a window.
As reported by the pro-Kremlin Mash channel on Telegram, Rogachev was suffering from cancer, and his condition was advanced. Mash claims he left a farewell letter and, according to investigators, committed suicide.
However, the independent VChK-OGPU channel writes on Telegram that sources "close to Rogachev" categorically denied the cancer diagnosis. The deceased's relatives stated he had breakfast with his family, his mood seemed normal, and there were no signs of suicidal intentions.
Meanwhile, the opposition Belarusian channel Nexta, discussing Rogachev's death, placed the supposed cause of death—falling out of a window—in quotation marks.
Not the first such case
As noted by the Lenta portal, since 2022, several managers of Russia's largest energy companies have died under suspicious circumstances. In January 2022, the head of transportation at Gazprom Invest, Leonid Shulman, allegedly committed suicide. In March, Aleksandr Tyulakov, the general director of the Unified Settlement Center for Corporate Security (responsible for Gazprom's finances), also died, with suicide cited as the cause.
Vladislav Avayev, former vice president of Gazprombank, died in April 2022 along with his wife and daughter, considered an extended suicide. Sergey Protosenya, the former chief accountant of the gas company Novatek, also passed away with his wife and daughter. Their bodies were found in their Spanish home in the resort of Lloret de Mar. In May, the former director of Lukoil, billionaire Aleksandr Subbotin, suddenly died from acute heart failure, reportedly after shamanic rituals.
In July 2022, the body of Yuri Voronov, who managed the transportation company Astra Shipping, which worked closely with Gazprom, was discovered near St. Petersburg. In September, the vice president of the Lukoil oil company, Ravil Maganov, reportedly fell from the sixth floor of a Moscow hospital. In the autumn of the following year, the chairman of the board of the Russian oil concern Lukoil, Vladimir Nekrasov, unexpectedly died of acute heart failure.
Media independent of the Kremlin tabulated that Nekrasov was the 17th high-level manager in Russia to have died since the start of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022, with 10 being members of boards of fuel and energy companies.
This fate affects not only people in the energy sector. In June 2023, Kristina Baikova, a 28-year-old vice president of Russian Loko-Bank, reportedly fell from a window. In July 2024, economist Valentina Bondarenko faced a similar fate.
The Yukos Corporation was established in 1993 and co-founded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an opposition figure living in London. At the beginning of the 21st century, Yukos was the largest oil company in Russia. The company went bankrupt in 2007, partly due to allegations of unpaid taxes.
