A former Russian commander who owned a tank factory died suddenly hours after Putin inexplicably canceled a meeting with him. The man is the latest in a series of unexplained deaths of senior Russian officials
A former tank commander has died suddenly just one day after Russian President Vladimir Putin abruptly canceled a meeting with him. The man is the latest in a series of unexplained deaths of senior Russian officials. The commander died suddenly one day after President Putin canceled a visit to his tank factory.
According to Russian media reports, former general Alexei Maslov, 69, died in a military hospital in Moscow last Sunday.
Putin was due to fly to the city of Nizhny Tagil, the second-largest city in Russia’s Sverdlovsk region, where the tank factory that has come under criticism from the Kremlin for not producing enough tanks for use in the war in Ukraine is located. But Putin canceled the visit at the last minute without explanation, according to local reports. Maslov’s death follows the similarly unexplained death of Alexander Buzhkov, 65, the general manager of Admiral Shipyards in St. Petersburg.
Following the mysterious deaths, Russia’s security service the FSB formed an “investigative group”, the group determined that Buzhkov was healthy the day before his death and “no health problems of Maslov were heard” before his death. Maslov was the commander-in-chief of the Russian ground forces from 2004 to 2008, after which he assumed the role of Russia’s chief military representative to NATO in Brussels.
The two join a long list of Russian officials who died under mysterious circumstances, one of them being the hot dog tycoon and politician Pavel Antov, who fell to his death from a hotel window in India, as reported in ‘Bahaderi Haredim’, his death came shortly after he called Russia’s missile fire on Kyiv as ” terrorism”.