Who was the Russian millionaire who criticized Putin, who was killed in a hotel in India 2 days after the death of his friend?

Russian sausage king Pavel Antov was found dead in a hotel in India two days after the death of a friend during the same trip.

The couple was visiting the eastern Indian state of Odisha, and the millionaire, who is also a politician, had celebrated his birthday at the hotel.

Antov was a well-known figure in the city of Vladimir, east of Moscow.

Last summer, he denied criticizing Russia’s war in Ukraine after a message appeared on his WhatsApp account.

The millionaire’s death is the latest in a series of unexplained deaths involving Russian magnates, many of whom were openly critical of the war, since the beginning of the Russian invasion.

According to Russian media reports, 65-year-old Antov fell from the window of a hotel in the town of Rayagada on Sunday, 25/12. His friend Vladimir Budanov also died in the same hotel on Friday.

Superintendent Vivekananda Sharma of the Odisha police said that Budanov suffered a stroke and that his friend “had become depressed after his death, which is why he himself died”.

Alexei Idamkin, the Russian consul in Kolkata, told Tass news agency that Indian police saw “no criminal element in these tragic events”.

Tour guide Jitendra Singh told reporters that Budanov “may have consumed a lot of alcohol because he had liquor bottles.”

Pavel Antov founded the Vladimir Standard meat processing plant, and in 2019 Forbes magazine estimated his fortune at about $140 million (about R$730 million), topping the list of the richest legislators and civil servants in Russia.

He played an important role in Vladimir’s legislative assembly, chairing the soil policy and ecology committee. Vyacheslav Kartukhin, deputy speaker of the parliament, said that his death occurred “under tragic circumstances”.

At the end of last June, Pavel Antov appeared to be reacting to a Russian missile attack on a housing block in Kiev’s Shevchenkivskyi district, which killed a man and injured his seven-year-old daughter and mother.

A message on Antov’s WhatsApp account describes how the family was pulled from the rubble: “It is extremely difficult to call all this anything but terror.”

The message was later deleted, and Antov said on social media that he was a supporter of President Putin, a “patriot of my country”, and supported the war.

He insisted that the WhatsApp message “comes from someone whose view he strongly disagrees with on the special military operation in Ukraine”. He added that the message was sent to his account by mistake and that it was a very annoying misunderstanding.

Other famous Russian magnates have died under mysterious circumstances since the beginning of the war.

In September, Ravil Maganov, head of Russian oil giant Lukoil, apparently fell out of the window of a hospital in Moscow.

– This text was published at https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/internacional-64103693.