The former publisher of a Russian newspaper has died in Moscow. The official line is that Vyacheslav Leontyev, 87, fell from the fifth-floor window of his Moscow apartment, a 70-foot plunge. Authorities believe it may have been suicide following a “nervous breakdown.” Leontyev headed up Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. After the USSR’s collapse in 1991, Pravda was restructured, and Leontyev continued at the helm. Exiled Russian journalist Andrey Malgin commented on Leontyev’s death, writing on social media, “The window falls continue.” He added that the veteran publisher “knew a lot about the party’s money.” Malgin’s tweet references a string of deaths under mysterious circumstances in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Several business leaders, journalists, and former officials have met untimely deaths. There have been more than 20 such deaths since Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago. This has been dubbed ‘Russian Sudden Death Syndrome.’ The chairman of Lukoil, Russia’s second-largest oil company, Ravil Maganov, met his end in 2022, months after criticizing Putin’s “special military operation.” Politician and businessman Pavel Antov, who railed against Putin’s “terror” in Ukraine, suffered the same fate, also in 2022, as did anti-war singer Vadim Stroykin earlier this year.
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