Dozens of high-profile Russians have died in the past 3 years, in Russia and abroad under suspicious circumstances.
February 2017, four days after Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin’s sudden death in New York City, the United States Mission to the United Nations, wrote to the New York City Mayor’s Office for International Affairs, and requested a communications blackout on Churkin’s autopsy findings and cause of death.
The result of this request means that the public may never know the official reason for the ambassador’s death.
The two letters from the US mission, which is part of the US State Department, requesting public suppression are dated Feb. 24 and March 1.
They were made public by the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, or OCME, on March 10.
Donovan of the US mission cited diplomatic immunity — “privileges and immunities accorded to diplomatic envoys” — as a root argument for the chief medical examiner to withhold Churkin’s autopsy findings.
Donovan referenced two legal agreements: Article 4, Section 15 of the 1974 Headquarters Agreement and Article 29 of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
The autopsy communication constraints were not the case for a second Russian national, Sergei Krivov, who died unexpectedly at age 63 at the Russian consulate on the Upper East Side in New York City on Nov. 8, 2016.
The chief medical examiner’s office released his cause of death, which was “hemorrhagic complications of aorto-broncho-esophageal fistula due to probable neoplasm.” Krivov died of natural causes.
The anonymous man had not fallen dozens of feet from the roof of the consular building, they said, but rather had suffered a heart attack in the security office, and died.
However, if the ruling was pending review, it would be changed if the cause of death ended up differing from the original assessment.
After conducting an autopsy and finishing its investigation, the New York City Medical Examiner ruled that Krivov died from bleeding in the chest area, likely due to a tumor.
Police sources said foul play wasn’t suspected and that Krivov had been in poor health, but many analysts describe as another cover up.
By the time the man’s body left the morgue the next day, Donald J. Trump was president-elect of the United States.
With the election results, and a world had turned upside down, the death of Krivov at the consulate quickly faded from view.
But who was Krivov? And how did he really die?
English-language news reports said Krivov, identified then only as a 63-year-old Russian national and Manhattan resident, working as a security officer.
But a November report from Sputnik, the English-language Russian media outlet, says Krivov was a consular duty commander.
That position is no ordinary security guard, Krivov would have had access to the consulate’s crypto-card, a top secret device used to encrypt and decrypt messages between the consulate and other Russian channels.
According to other public Russian-language descriptions of the duty commander position, Krivov would have also been in charge of “prevention of sabotage” and suppression of “attempts of secret intrusion” into the consulate.
In other words, it was Krivov’s job to make sure US intelligence agencies didn’t have ears in the building.
It’s an open secret, US intelligence officials say, that the consulate is a staging ground for Russian intelligence operations.
It’s also a coveted target for US agents because its importance, which has been underscored as US intelligence agencies try to unravel accusations of a Russian sweeping operation to manipulate the US election.
“That’s always a target,” the US intelligence official said of the Manhattan consulate.
Krivov also helped transmit via SIGINT, such intercepted electronic communications or IP addresses.
Key to the intelligence community assessment were a multitude of intelligence channels, including signals intelligence — or SIGINT — like intercepted electronic communications or IP addresses.
The specifics of where that SIGINT came from, and what it consisted of, remain secret, so despite being described as a Manhattan resident by the NYPD, Krivov is a phantom in public records.
No one with his name, or any iteration of it, has lived in Manhattan for years (in the NYPD’s files, Krivov’s name is not transliterated as “Sergei” or “Sergey” but as the less common “Cergej”), however BuzzFeed News went to Krivov’s address, listed in the NYPD’s files, at 11 E. 90th St., it wasn’t a residence.
It’s a Smithsonian-owned office building for its neighboring Cooper Hewitt design museum, located a block behind the Russian Consulate, which is at 9 E. 91st St.
Asked about the discrepancy, the NYPD insisted that 11 E. 90th St. was the address they had been given for Krivov, apparently by Russian consular officials.
“No one is living here — this is where my desk is right now,” a Smithsonian employee at the address said when BuzzFeed News called.
It’s unclear how thoroughly or for how long the NYPD investigated Krivov’s death.
Multiple officials declined to offer any details about the investigation.
Several officers told BuzzFeed News the case is listed as “closed.”
“The narrative of the story is kind of vague, it’s not saying much,” one officer said, scanning the incident report with BuzzFeed News on the phone.
“With all cases like this, it is investigated by the detective squad,” he said.
“For some reason it was closed out.”
A separate officer said the case was listed as “no criminology suspected, natural causes.”
After BuzzFeed News published this story, the Medical Examiner’s office said that, while it did continue investigating the cause of death, the office had determined Krivov died naturally, saying …
“We are doing advanced studies to characterize the details of the underlying disease.”
Further, the office said it is not unusual for the NYPD to close the case despite the lack of a clear cause of death, since the office had said the death was not suspicious.
It’s not necessarily uncommon for toxicology tests to take weeks or even months to come back.
The medical examiner’s office would not specify the kind of further testing being done, though when the toxicology tests were completed, the office continued, the results were not going to be related to the death.
But others who spoke with BuzzFeed News said his disconnect between the medical examiner’s office and the NYPD is not normal.
In standard practice, a death investigation would not be formally closed by police officers until the medical examiner had reached a determination on the death.
“It’s open until you can get a cause of death….there has to be a complete circuit with a case,” said Marq Claxton, a former NYPD investigator.
“That case is going to stay open until there’s a final determination, it could be a homicide, it could be something, it could be accidental or whatever.”
A separate medical examiner official said Krivov’s body had been released the day after his death, but declined to say to whom the body was released.
None of the 5 major funeral chapels or funeral homes in upper Manhattan knew of any recently deceased person named Krivov.
The New York City Health Department declined BuzzFeed News’ request to search for records related to Krivov’s death, saying that by standard practices, any search had to be requested by a family member.
The city’s burial desk, which tracks documentation from funeral homes, said it only files paperwork and doesn’t have a searchable database.
The NYPD denied BuzzFeed News’ request for the incident report, saying the request did not contain enough details, including the date, precinct, and location of Krivov’s death, or the incident number.
BuzzFeed News’ request in fact included all of that information.
A separate denial said the incident report “is not a public record and can only be obtained through due process of law (Court Ordered Subpoena).”
According to experts and former police officers, incident reports are not generally withheld by the NYPD.
“The incident report, after an investigation is closed, typically that is releasable,” said Michael Morisy, the founder of MuckRock, a nonprofit organization dedicated to government transparency and records laws.
“It’s really weird that they would categorically state that was rejected…incident reports are not broadly exempt from public records law.”
but an again cited customary international law “regarding diplomatic missions” to argue that [deceased] person enjoys complete personal inviolability from government authorities (including administrative subdivisions),” such as the chief medical examiner.
The US government’s expectations of the rights of overseas American diplomats, noting that “when American diplomats die abroad, the U.S. government resists autopsies by host government authorities on the basis of personal inviolability,” suggesting that the US has a reciprocal obligation to the diplomats of nations assigned to the UN located in New York City.
It is noted, regarding the investigation of sudden death, the Russian Federation did not raise concerns and “disclosure by the City is discretionary, they do not view release of the information to be legally necessary.”
As police made their way to the consulate that Election Day morning, Americans’ interest in Moscow had reached a fever pitch of Cold War–era proportions, fueled by a near-constant barrage of reports detailing a wide-ranging Russian intelligence operation that the US intelligence community says was designed to undermine the US election.
It stands to reason Krivov, who was nearing the upper end of the mortality curve for Russian men, may have died a completely natural death, and that much of the hand-wringing over the incident is due to bureaucratic red tape rather than suspicious circumstances.
But given the unique circumstances — and a backdrop of plummeting US–Russia relations — the lack of information has done little to quell theories.
The more questions that were asked about Krivov, the less people wanted to talk.
“No one seems to want to discuss this,” one law enforcement source said, after reaching out to other law enforcement officials to see what they had heard about the case.
In the hours following Krivov’s death, the NYPD had said it would identify him following notification of his family.
When BuzzFeed News asked for his identity months later, police immediately said the request would have to go to through the US State Department.
The State Department, after being initially responsive, abruptly told BuzzFeed News it wouldn’t help, and said the information would have to come from the Russian Consulate.
The incident — and the lack of information surrounding it — has also raised eyebrows in Washington.
Two sources to whom BuzzFeed News spoke, who requested anonymity to discuss the probe, said Krivov appeared to be a heavy drinker, which law enforcement concluded led to his natural death.
“I don’t think there’s anything there,” one US intelligence official said.
The State Department also refused to say whether Krivov was registered as a foreign agent, how long he had been in the US, what his immigration status was, and whether they had any contact with the Russian mission regarding his death.
When asked about the incident, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said: “Are you serious?” She continued: “He had heart problems, he had heart attacks. It’s weird that your outlet is interested in this.”
“The employee of the Consulate General of Russia Sergei Krivov passed away on November 8, 2016,” the consulate told BuzzFeed News.
“An American doctor that was admitted to the Consulate General stated (giving the same answer BuzzFeed had at this point already received) without a doubt that the death was by natural reasons, when asked the same question by BuzzFeed.
The FBI said it was not involved in investigating Krivov’s death.
It declined to comment further and deferred to the NYPD.
Krivov’s place of employment — a palatial stone compound
in Manhattan’s posh Upper East Side — has long been one of the premiere spy hotspots in the decades-old espionage war between the US and Moscow.
Where many aficionados would understandably expect Washington, DC, to be prime real estate for cloak-and-dagger theater, New York City is oft-trodden territory, not least for its hosting of the United Nations.
It is unknown whether Krivov worked with Russian or US intelligence agencies. His work may not have even put him near any intelligence operations that were being run out of the consulate.
According to FBI court documents from 2015, the foreign arm of the Russian intelligence service, the SVR, likely keeps a secure office space inside the Manhattan consulate where Krivov worked.
In criminal documents filed against Evgeny Buryakov, Igor Sporyshev, and Victor Podobny — three undercover Russian foreign intelligence agents working in New York City — the bureau described “a secure office in Manhattan used by SVR agents to send and receive intelligence reports and assignments from Moscow (the ‘SVR NY Office’).”
In an unprecedented report issued in early January, on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, the intelligence community writ large detailed the concerted Russian effort to manipulate and undermine the US election.
BuzzFeed News has filed a FOIA request with the NYPD for the police report on Krivov’s death, and any related paperwork.
That request was received, but a determination has not yet been made as to whether the department will provide them.
Maybe those documents will provide insight into a death that, for now, remains a mystery.
CORRUPTION 6/38
Embezzlement, sports doping and other forms of official corruption are common in Russia. When accused perpetrators suddenly expire, or are stabbed to death in a jail cell, Russian media often speculate they were silenced to keep them from exposing other cheaters.
Mikhail Lesin, 57
Former media director of Russia energy company Gazprom and founder of RT (Russia Today TV network) was found dead in a Dupont Circle hotel in Washington, D.C., of blunt force injuries to the head.
Vyacheslav Sinev, 58
Chairman of the executive board of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) – cause unknown.
Nikita Kamaev, 52
Two months after resigning as executive director of of Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA,) which was involved in a doping scandal that resulted in the temporary suspension of Russia’s track and field program. Kamaev was preparing a book, died of a heart attack after cross-country skiing.
Vladimir Yevdokimov, 55
Former executive director of Roskosmos space agency, awaiting trial on accusations of embezzling up to $3.5 million. Found dead in his jail cell with stab wounds.
Nikolai Volkov, 41
Head of Construction Department at Russia’s Interior Ministry, two weeks after reporting $170 million embezzled from his department. Shot near his home in suspected contract killing.
Vadim Tyulpanov, 52
Russian senator who was overseeing World Cup preparations “slipped in the bathhouse and hit his head” in a St. Petersburg fitness center a day after the St. Petersburg metro bombing.
DIPLOMATS 7/38
Russian diplomats have been dying of various mysterious causes in the past 18 months, from head trauma to alleged natural causes and a shooting. The frequency raises questions for many.
Igor Sergun, 58
General and director of the GRU military intelligence service and deputy chief of the armed services general staff, died of unknown causes after traveling to Syria to negotiate with President Bashar Assad. Some reports said Sergun was sent to ask Assad to resign. On Jan. 6, Russian media said Sergun died of fatigue.
Sergei Krivov, 63
Consular duty commander for the Russian Consulate in Manhattan, found dead of apparent head injuries on consulate floor. The New York Medical Examiner concluded he died of internal bleeding due to a tumor.
Roman Skrynikov, age unknown
Russian diplomat in Ust-Kamenogorsk, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan found dead of apparent heart attack in his apartment.
Andrei Malanin, 55
Russian consul found dead in his apartment in Athens, of “natural causes”.
Chief adviser to Latin America department at the Russian Foreign Ministry, found dead in his Moscow apartment from a gunshot wound to the head hours after the shooting murder of Andrei Karlov, Russia’s ambassador to Ankara, Turkey.
Alexander Kadakin, 67
Russian ambassador to India since November 2009, died in hospital after brief illness.
Russian ambassador to the U.N. since 2006, died at work in New York of an apparent heart attack. The U.S. State Department asked NYC medical examiner to not release autopsy results, citing diplomatic protocol.
PUTIN CRITICS 10/38
Critics of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in past years have been killed in dramatic attacks. In one, investigators such as Britain’s Scotland Yard said were intended to send a chilling message to others. If arrests were made, they did not lead to whoever ordered the killing.
Alexander Pochinok, 56
Pochinok was a former government minister who had warned in an interview on Dozhd TV that Crimea would cost Russia more than the war in Chechnya and the Sochi Olympics combined. He died of a heart attack two days before the ceremony in Moscow to annex Crimea.
Valeriya Novodvorskaya, 64
Soviet-era dissident who spoke out against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, died of toxic shock syndrome in a moscow hospital.
Boris Nemtsov, 55
Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and outspoken Putin critic, was shot on a bridge near the Kremlin.
Alesya Malakyan, 35
Malakyan was the daughter of opposition activist Irina Kalmykova, who was fleeing Russia to Ukraine to escape trial for protesting. Cause of Malakyan’s death is unknown.
Pavel Sheremet, 44
Belarusian-born Russian journalist was killed in a car bombing in Kiev.
Vladimir Shreydler, 48
An outspoken pro-Ukrainian activist who appeared on Russian talk shows, Shreydler died of heart attack after being ill, but active, for some time.
Viktor Parshutkin, 57
Parshutkin was a Russian lawyer who became well-known in Ukraine for forcing Russia to withdraw falsified charges against a Ukrainian political prisone. He died suddenly in Moscow of unknown causes.
Yevgeny Khamaganov, 35
An opposition journalist from Siberian Buryatia who criticized the Russian government died in a hospital in Ulan-Ude. Some reports said he died of a beating; others said it was was due to complications from diabetes.
Denis Voronenkov, 45
The former Russian member of parliament was shot and killed in front of a hotel in Kiev.
Nikolai Andrushchenko, 73
The co-founder and editor of opposition newspaper Novy Peterburg was attacked while leaving the newspaper offices.
UKRAINE 13/38
Ukrainians revolted against their pro-Russian president in February 2014. Neighboring Russia called the revolution a coup, sent troops into Ukraine in March, and claimed the Crimean peninsula as part of Russia on March 18. Two Russian-backed “people’s republics” were formed in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine. Ukrainians suspect Russia is eliminating republic leaders, some considered uncontrollable, and replacing them with pro-Russian Ukrainians.
Reshat Ametov, 39
The Crimean Tatar activist was abducted by three unidentified men in military uniforms March 3 while protesting the Russian takeover by himself in front of Crimean Council of Ministers building in Simferopol. His body was found in a forest with signs of violence and torture.
Volodymyr Rybak, 42
A member of the Horlivka City Council, Rybak was abducted and murdered by pro-Russian militia after trying to raise the Ukrainian flag on the council building. His body was found with another, both with signs of torture.
Roman “Tsygan” Voznik, age unknown
The commander of the Mirazh battalion in Donbass, and former member of Ukraine’s special police force, was killed when his car was attacked in the center of Donetsk.
Alexei Mozgovoi, 40
The Russian-backed commander who led the notorious Ghost Battalion in the Luhansk People’s Republic was killed in an ambush of his car. He was critical of both the Ukraine government and fellow rebel leaders.
Pavel Dryomov, 37
A prominent Cossack commander in the Luhansk People’s Republic, Dryomov was killed in a car bomb on his way home from his wedding.
Yevhen Zhvlin, 40
A pro-Russian activist from Ukraine, Zhvlin was shot dead in an upscale restaurant outside Moscow by a gunman disguised with a fake moustache and Panama hat.
Gennady Tsyplakov, 42
The former prime minister of Luhansk People’s Republic was found hanged in jail. He may have been tortured after a republic leader alleged Tsyplakov organized an attempted coup.
Arsen “Motorola” Pavlov, 33
A pro-Russian defense force commander in the Donetsk People’s Republic, Pavlov was killed by a bomb in an apartment elevator.
Valery Bolotov, 47
A former leader of Luhansk People’s Republic, died possibly after a cup of coffee in Moscow.
Oleg Anashenko, 48
A commander in the Russian-backed Luhansk People’s Republic, Anashenko was killed in car bomb in Luhansk.
Mikhail “Givi” Tolstykh, 36
The commander of the Somalia battalion in Donbas. Killed by an explosion in his office.
Vladimir Makovich, 54
Former co-chairman of the Donetsk People’s Republic Government who read ‘declaration of independence’ on April 7, 2014, died of mysterious illness in Donetsk.
Alexander Kharaberyush, age unknown
The deputy chief of Donetsk Oblast Security Service of Ukraine’s counter intelligence unit was killed by a car bomb.
TRUMP DOSSIER 2/38
Two people havedied who were described by Russia analysts as likely connected to a dossier written by a former British spy on Donald Trump and his campaign staff’s alleged collusion with Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential elections. At least four others who were alleged to be connected to the scandal have been arrested in Moscow.
Oleg Erovinkin, 61
Erovinkin, a general in Russia’s intelligence Agency, was suspected of helping a British intelligence agent compile a damaging dossier on Donald Trump. Erovinkin, a close associate of a Putin confidant and oil company owner, Igor Sechin, was found dead in the back of his car in Moscow. No cause of death was reported.
Alex Oronov, 69
Oronov was a Ukrainian émigré businessman in New York who organized a meeting between Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, Felix Sater and Ukrainian member of parliament Andriy Artemenko in January 2017 about a peace plan for Ukraine that would have benefited Russia. The cause of his death remains unknown.
Thank you , that’s such an amazing compliment and very kind of you.
Boy, you are definitely a world class journalist. I am glad hat someone like you writes about these things that many of us will not hear, read or see anywhere else. Thank you for such a good and informative article.