A British-educated singer-songwriter was found dead yesterday having fallen from his tenth floor apartment moments after Russian cops stormed the building to interview him amid suspicions he had ‘donated funds to Ukraine’s Armed Forces’.
Vadim Stroykin, 58, became the latest Russian to take a suspiciously timed nosedive out of a high window as police performed a search at his flat on Parfenovskaya Street in central St. Petersburg.
Authorities had launched an investigation into well-known radio host and composer Stroykin, whom they suspected of ‘participation in a terrorist organisation’ in connection with Part 2 of Article 205.5 of Russia’s Criminal Code, according to several independent Russian outlets.
He had shared a variety of anti-war posts on social media profiles and labelled Vladimir Putin a ‘b****** who went to war not only against a brotherly nation, but declared war on his own people.’
Russian Telegram channels that reported his death said that, during the police raid on his house, Stroykin ‘went into a spare room, hastily opened a window and committed an irreversible act’.
Born in Russia’s Ural Mountains, Stroykin forged a career in the arts, graduating from the British College of Journalism before becoming a radio host working for the Yekaterinburg bureau of the station ‘Echo of Moscow’, according to Russian reports and a short autobiography published on his website.
There he led a show called ‘Anthology of the Author’s Song’, before going on to release several albums and compositions of his own while launching a successful travel agency.
In his later years, he moved to St. Petersburg and opened a guitar school, before becoming a staunch anti-war advocate following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Vadim Stroykin, 58, became the latest Russian to take a suspiciously timed nosedive out of a high window as police performed a search at his flat on Parfenovskaya Street in central St. Petersburg
Born in Russia’s Ural Mountains, Stroykin forged a career in the arts, graduating from the British College of Journalism before becoming a radio host working for the Yekaterinburg bureau of the station ‘Echo of Moscow ‘.
Stroykin joins a horrifyingly long list of Russians to have fallen to their deaths or sustained life-changing injuries in highly irregular circumstances since the Russian President ordered his troops into Ukraine almost three years ago.
The list includes everyone from high-ranking government officials, captains of Russian industry and military chiefs to anti-war protesters and Kremlin critics.
Earlier this week, a top Russian colonel died after plunging 50ft from a window while another was seriously injured from a similar fall.
Anti-monopoly service official Artur Pryakhin, 56, who had previously been a police colonel, was found dead after he fell from a fifth floor window in Petrozavodsk.
Authorities were reportedly looking into his death, but official media outlets rushed out reports that he died by ‘suicide’ before an investigation had concluded.
Meanwhile, Colonel Alexey Zubkov – an employee of Russia’s Investigative Committee – is fighting for his life after he plummeted a fourth floor window, according to Telegram channel VChK-OGPU.
Miraculously, Col. Zubkov was ‘conscious’ after his fall and ‘briskly answered questions’ but was unable to explain the reasons for his plunge.
He is the head of the forensic investigations department specialising in the study of digital information, with access to detailed information about secret investigations.
Stroykin joins a horrifyingly long list of Russians to have fallen to their deaths or sustained life-changing injuries in highly irregular circumstances
Artur Pryakhin died after falling from a fifth floor window
Colonel Alexey Zubkov – an employee for the Russian Investigative Committee – is fighting for his life after he plummeted 40ft from a bathroom window
One of the most high-profile deaths came in August 2022 when Ravil Maganov, chairman of Lukoil, Russia’s second-largest oil company, fell from a sixth floor window at Moscow’s elite Central Clinical Hospital, also known as the Kremlin Clinic.
On the same morning, Putin – who had earlier decorated Maganov, 67, with a top honour – swept into the hospital to pay his final respects to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader who passed away in hospital the same week.
In 2023, leading war official Marina Yankina, 58, head of the financial support department of the Russian Defence Ministry’s Western Military District, was found dead after falling from a 16th-floor window in St. Petersburg.
Former oil company vice president Mikhail Rogachev also died after falling from his tenth-floor apartment in Moscow in October 2024.
He had been a senior executive at Yukos, an oil company dismembered by Putin and his cronies.
He was found at the entrance to his building by an employee of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence agency and with injuries characteristic of a plunge, local media said.
There have been a slew of highly suspicious deaths among Russia’s political, industrial and military elite since Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine
Pryakhin died after falling from a fifth floor window
TV channels reported that he lived on the tenth floor and that it was a suicide, claiming he had cancer and left a note – but those reports were vehemently denied by his close friends and relatives.
Those close to Rogachev insisted there were no signs that he was suicidal and he was in a ‘good mood’ shortly before his death.
Rogachev had a long and successful career in some of post-Soviet Russia’s leading companies.
In 2007, he became a deputy general director of Vladimir Potanin’s Norilsk Nickel, with Potanin now Russia’s wealthiest man who has also been sanctioned by Britain as part of Putin’s ‘inner circle’.
