Hello, Weird Little Guys Listeners! We want to share a new show you might enjoy, SAD OLIGARCH Season 2! About the show: Since January 2022, dozens of Russia's wealthiest oligarchs and power brokers have died suddenly. One was poisoned with frog venom. Two killed their whole families. Several fell out of high windows. Most of the deaths are suspicious. Russia says they're coincidental suicides—that the deceased were simply depressed. We don't think so... Sad Oligarch is an investigative podcast series that looks into the strange deaths of the Russian elite, unravelling a dark tale of Kremlin corruption and Putin's political dictatorship across the world. This is season two—Russian oligarchs are still dying and things have gotten even weirder... Listen here and subscribe to SAD OLIGARCH Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
On February 24th, 2022, Russian forces crossed over the border into Ukraine with heavy weapons and armored vehicles.
This was stage 1 of Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
His plan was to quickly sweep across the country and take the capital of Kiev.
It didn't quite go like that though.
Ukrainians fought back.
They formed volunteer militia forces, backed up the military, and campaigned for better weapons from the West.
Three years into the war, and Russia is still nowhere near Kiev.
Thousands have died on the battlefield, and civilian infrastructure is targeted every week, but still Ukraine is holding strong.
As is the case with any war, peculiar things began to happen after the invasion.
Anti-Putin Russian saboteurs got to work inside Russia, the Kremlin sought to disrupt Europe through criminal gangs, and black market weapons dealing went into overdrive.
Something that caught my eye in particular though was a little bit stranger than all of this.
I noticed that there was a vast number of Russian oligarchs who started falling out of windows.
If it wasn't windows, it was some other clumsy or extremely violent death.
So I got in touch with my friend and colleague Sergi Slipchenko.
He's a Ukrainian journalist who speaks both Russian and English fluently.
We'd been on the ground working in Kiev the week of the invasion.
He agreed, as did many other journalists at the time, that this was really weird.
Together we dug deeper into the deaths of these rich Russian power brokers.
What we found was an unprecedented number of accidents, suicides, and violent murders, sending oligarchs to their grave.
Now we don't particularly care if some Russian oligarch dies, but to understand these weird Kremlin linked deaths is to proper understand Putin and what he's up to.
It was clear a pattern was emerging and we wanted to document it.
And so Sad Oligarch was born.
Since we finished season 1, the millionaires and billionaires keep dropping like flies.
So get ready for Sad Oligarch Season 2, an investigative podcast that focuses on the mysterious deaths of Russia's Kremlin-linked power brokers.
