Weird Little Guys - Introducing: SAD OLIGARCH Season 2
Aired: 2025-10-08
Duration: 02:45

[00:00:03]  On February 24th, 2022, Russian forces crossed over the border into Ukraine with heavy weapons and armored vehicles.
[00:00:13]  This was stage 1 of Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
[00:00:19]  His plan was to quickly sweep across the country and take the capital of Kiev.
[00:00:26]  It didn't quite go like that though.
[00:00:29]  Ukrainians fought back.
[00:00:31]  They formed volunteer militia forces, backed up the military, and campaigned for better weapons from the West.
[00:00:38]  Three years into the war, and Russia is still nowhere near Kiev.
[00:00:43]  Thousands have died on the battlefield, and civilian infrastructure is targeted every week, but still Ukraine is holding strong.
[00:00:52]  As is the case with any war, peculiar things began to happen after the invasion.
[00:00:58]  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.
[00:01:10]  Something that caught my eye in particular though was a little bit stranger than all of this.
[00:01:16]  I noticed that there was a vast number of Russian oligarchs who started falling out of windows.
[00:01:24]  If it wasn't windows, it was some other clumsy or extremely violent death.
[00:01:31]  So I got in touch with my friend and colleague Sergi Slipchenko.
[00:01:37]  He's a Ukrainian journalist who speaks both Russian and English fluently.
[00:01:42]  We'd been on the ground working in Kiev the week of the invasion.
[00:01:46]  He agreed, as did many other journalists at the time, that this was really weird.
[00:01:52]  Together we dug deeper into the deaths of these rich Russian power brokers.
[00:01:57]  What we found was an unprecedented number of accidents, suicides, and violent murders, sending oligarchs to their grave.
[00:02:07]  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.
[00:02:18]  It was clear a pattern was emerging and we wanted to document it.
[00:02:23]  And so Sad Oligarch was born.
[00:02:28]  Since we finished season 1, the millionaires and billionaires keep dropping like flies.
[00:02:35]  So get ready for Sad Oligarch Season 2, an investigative podcast that focuses on the mysterious deaths of Russia's Kremlin-linked power brokers.