According to reports on Russian Telegram, Robertus felt he was being 'persecuted' and feared he was being set up to face a criminal investigation amid bitter feuding at the top level of the US-sanctioned company. He had held a meeting with his boss Oleg Pashaev where he probably got the bad news. A few hours later he was found dead in his washroom.
Previous causes of death among Lukoil executives include toad venom, 6th-story hospital window defenestration, and 'heart attack.'
Lukoil is the second largest company in Russia after Gazprom, but they made the unfortunate choice (for them) of criticizing Russia's war in Ukraine as bad for business. Since then it's been very bad for their top executives.
Source: Daily Beast
Russian oil giant Lukoil has lost yet another top executive under mysterious circumstances as its vice president died “suddenly” at the age of 53, adding to a spate of deaths of figures linked to the gas and oil industry in the country.
The company announced the death of Vitaly Robertus in a brief statement Wednesday, expressing “deep regret” over his death but providing no further details on the manner in which he died.
His passing comes after a string of bizarre deaths at the company. Most recently, in late October, Vladimir Nekrasov, the chairman of the company’s board, died unexpectedly of what the company said was acute heart failure. He was 66 and had been brought in to head the board after the previous chairman, Ravil Maganov, plunged from a sixth-floor hospital window and died in September 2022.
Months earlier, in May 2022, another top executive at the company died under strange circumstances. Alexander Subbotin was said to have died of a “drug-induced heart attack,” with Kremlin-friendly media outlets claiming he’d ingested some kind of toad venom while visiting with a shaman.
According to Russian Telegram channel Baza:
Russian media reported that shortly before his death, Robertus complained of feeling unwell and asked for headache pills, after which he went to his office.
"He didn't leave for several hours, Robertus didn't answer his phone. The employees decided to go into his office and found his body. The top manager committed suicide and died of asphyxia. He had worked at the company for about 30 years," the publication writes.
And it's also been a hell of a week for Lukoil in other ways too, as three of their major oil refineries were put of commission by Ukrainian drone strikes. For whatever reason, Russian air defenses seem incapable of bringing down the slow-moving drones. They were able to hit their targets within meters, despite being hundreds of kilometers from the border.
All these assassinations of Lukoil executives likely stem from Lukoil going directly against Putin when they issued a public call to end the war on March 3rd, 2022, just 7 days after his full-scale invasion of Ukraine right as he was trying to capture Kyiv. pic.twitter.com/ulS83gorzw
— Igor Sushko (@igorsushko) March 13, 2024
