Russian sausage baron politician dies after reported fall from hotel window – Reuters

Russian entrepreneur and local lawmaker Pavel Antov – who criticized the Kremlin’s assault on Ukraine on one brief occasion – was found dead on Christmas Eve while on holiday in India, authorities said he had fallen from his hotel window.

A friend of Antov named Vladimir Budanov died in the same hotel a few days earlier. Vivekanand Sharma, a police official in the Indian state of Odisha, said Budanov suffered a stroke while Antov “was depressed after his death and he too died”.

Citing local police, Indian news outlet NDTV reported that a Russian tourist had died after falling from the third floor of a hotel. Russian consul in Kolkata Alexei Idamkin told Russian state news agency TASS that police did not see a “criminal element in these tragic events”. Antov had just celebrated his 65th birthday at the hotel.

Antov, who made his 130 million euro fortune from a meat processing plant, was a local politician in the town of Vladimir, east of Moscow.

Last June, in a message on his WhatsApp account, Antov appeared to denounce a Russian missile attack on a residential building in Ukraine, saying that “it is extremely difficult to call all this anything other than terror”.

Shortly after, the post was deleted. Antov then posted on other social networks that he was a supporter of the president, a “patriot of my country” and that the message had come from someone with whom he strongly disagreed with the opinion on “the ‘special military operation in Ukraine’ and which had accidentally been posted on his messenger.

The millionaire becomes the latest in a string of Russian tycoons who have died in mysterious circumstances, many of whom have openly criticized President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. In September, the chairman of Russian oil giant Lukoil, Ravil Maganov, who called the Russian invasion a “tragedy” and expressed sympathy for its victims, died from a hospital window in Moscow.