Media. Something strange is going on. Another member of the Russian elite has been found dead.
Reports suggests that he fell out of a window poisoned with mushrooms.
He died of heart failure, died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
How comesy are they?
Dozens of Russian oligachs, politically motivated millionaires have died in the space of three years, most of them in suspicious circumstances. Many have hidden links to the Kremlin. This is sad Oligach Season two, an ongoing investigation into these recently dead Russian power brokers. Sad Oligach is created by me jake Hanrahan and my Ukrainian colleague Sergey Slipchenkov. This is a
H eleven studio and Coolso Media production. January where He's sixth twenty twenty six, Paris, France, Thirty eight year old Russian journalist Yevgeny Safronov is extremely stressed out. He's been hacked. All of his social media accounts Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, VK, the Lot, even his Telegram channel has been hijacked. He's been targeted by nefarious operators on the other side of the world. Safronov lives in a small apartment in the
Hartster Scene suburb in Paris. It's a nice area, mostly clean, accessible and with a generally low crime rate. He's here because he's in a self induced exile. The newspaper he worked for back in Russia was deemed to be a traitorous publication. In twenty twenty one, it was slaped with the Foreign Act designation by the Kremlin, essentially classing it as an enemy of the state. The paper was critical of Putin's regime, and at this stage we all know
what happens when you cross the dictator's red line. It's at this stage that Safronov took the wire's decision to flee. He left Russia for good, taking himself into exile for fear of being arrested and sent to prison. He'd basically just been doing his job, but as a real journalist in Russia, that's a very dangerous activity. At first, Safronov stayed with his newspaper and relocated with most of the other staff members. This provided him continued income and a
visa to live elsewhere. He was doing okay and learning to adapt to a life outside of his home country, but for reasons currently unknown, he was fired in late twenty twenty four. After all that, Safronov was let go, evil, the threats from the Russian government, the fear, all of it was seemingly for nothing. He had to move on once again and spent his time drifting through India and Turkey. Eventually, Safronov managed to secure himself a visa to live in France.
Considering the area he moved to, it's safe to say that he either had some cash left over, had a trust fund like many journalists, or had found a new work pretty quickly. Back in his apartment, Safronov is pacing up and down. Anxiety grips him. He's in a terrible state. He lost his job, his reputation, and his safety inside his own country. He's depressed, to say the least. He's popping pills medication. What he's taken exactly is currently unknown,
but it's worth noting he's on something. He sits at his desk and begins at writing letters. One of them is a suicide note. Scrawling across the page. In Russian, he writes, quote, all my accounts have been hacked. My Telegram account has been stolen, all my mobile phones and applications have been cloned. My text messages and phone conversations have been intercepted. My phone has been infected by hackers. I am the only one to blame for my death.
You can also blame my negligence. I understand that I have disappointed many people. I have no excuses except that I didn't want to hurt anyone. I have never worked for Russia's interests, and I have never been recruited by anyone. End quote. He finishes this letter and leaves it for his roommate to find.
It.
Seems his final will and testament is strangely mostly about getting hacked. With this, Safronov pulls a chair to the window of his apartment. He's on the seventh floor, a solid sixty feet up, maybe more. At this site, you've got an eighty percent chance of death if you hit the asphalt below. Safronov is about to test these odds. His paranoia, his stress, his depression, it's all hit fever, pitch. Sadly, he doesn't feel as if there's any other way out
of this nightmare he's going through. Safronov steps up onto the chair and positions himself at the open window below him. The ground is finished with a thin layer of French tarmac. Older stone cobbles separate the road from the pavement. What goes through his mind at this point is between him and his god. Safronov jumps. He hurtles to the floor of forty miles per hour. It takes him almost two seconds, but he hits the road flat out. Instantly his body
meets ground. Safronov is dead, lights out. That is the official story. We only know about this recent death due to sparse reporting on it in French and a little bit in Russian. As is strangely with all sad Oligarch cases, there are conflicting reports on what happened, even basic details. For example, it's still not known if Safronov's housemate was at the apartment when he jumped or not. He could have come by afterwards, or he could have been in
his own room. We don't know. It's reported that the housemate was apparently in so much shock that he couldn't even give a statement to police. Some reports say it wasn't the shock though, it was more the language barrier, as he only spoke Russian. But that makes no sense to me, as any police force in any capital city has dozens and dozens of translators on tap. They could have gotten hold of a Russian speaking translator very easily.
There are estimated fifty thousand Russian speakers living in Paris alone, many more across France who have phones. Now this doesn't speak to any kind of grand conspiracy or anything, but I do still find it quite unusual how this hasn't been treated as something a bit more newsworthy in France,
especially considering current geopolitical events. Think about it, a Russian dissident jumped from a window to his death on the street in the middle of Paris, after saying all of his devices and social medias were hacked, and yet the event seems to have come and gone already. This happened this month. In fact, the way that we found out that Yevgeny Safronov died was not from reporting in the news. He wasn't actually named at first. It was just a
Russian freelance journalist has committed suicide, that was it. He was actually another Russian journalist who first broke the news that it was Safronov who died. This other reporter, Dennis Balashov, also based in Paris, posted a photo of Safronov on his telegram channel in January with the following caption quote. At the end of twenty twenty four, Safronov suffered as he claimed an unfair dismissal from his media outlet that
had relocated to Europe. As a result, he was unable to renew his documents and was forced to leave his country of residence and wander through India and Istanbul until he received a French visa. Six months ago. He moved to Paris and tried to settle here. He was depressed. End quote. Now, I don't know about you, but that is one of the most blunt and coldest eulogies I
have ever read. Now to understand that Safronov's situation a little clearer, let's take a look into the media company he was working for that had apparently fired him not that long ago. This company is called Open Media, and surprise, it's owned by a big Russian oligarch. It's called Open Media, and the company fell out of favor with Putin when the oligach did. Let's talk to Sergey to find out.
More him working for Open Media founded by Michael Kodowski, who was he was an Alger himself, but he fell out with Putin way back in like the early two thousands, like the photos of him being with Putin, working with Putin, So he was like in his circle at some point, and then he fell out of favor and he founded
this news media. Now he's kind of labeled as a Putin critic, but it seems like he was, you know, from ninety from the nineties to the early two thousands, he was kind of, if not buddy buddy with him, he was involved with Putin somehow. So I don't know how big of a critic he.
Is, Okay now with time for a quick outbreak, right, not for that. Now back to the show.
It kind of seems one of those situations where well, now he's kind of like on the bad side of Putin, so he's so he's now criticizing him, you know, But when he was kind of benefiting from that relationship, he was completely.
Fine with it. Do we know what he was criticizing, That.
It's not a democracy and that Puttin is like a dictator. I didn't see anything too specific, but it seems like the publication itself is kind of like openly anti Putin regime.
Now, this situation with open media where it's being run by an oligarch that is suddenly anti Putin is actually quite a common thing in Russia. Many of the so called this an outlet, well, once upon a time friends with the regime. They eventually fell out, and the publication then turncoats as the oligarch that owns it does. Now that's not to say that all of Russian dissident media is like that, not at all. There are several outlets that genuinely are against the regime, against the Kremlin based
on their own want for freedom, morals and ethics. But many a time so called opposition leaders, particularly ones that are lauded in the West, often have a tricky, if not murky background. Anyway, let's get back to the conversation with Sergey. So this guy I was working for a oligarch newspaper essentially.
Yeah, so it's like, even though it's kind of reporting more of like his corruption and things that are against Puttin, right, So, like, I think most people will see that as a good thing, it's still definitely influenced and it's owned by an oligarch, right, So like, yeah, it's reporting the kind of the bad side of Russian government, but also like there's definitely gonna be a bias in that right, Even if you agree with it and you kind of support, like yeah, fuck Russia,
you still have to realize that there is a bias where it's again a Russian oligarch that owns this project and is running it. It sounds like funding it as well. Yeah, it's owned by him. It's kind of influenced by him to some degree.
I'm sure. Now let's just pause for a second here to talk about how media is influenced by oligarchy. Lots of media. Well, I'm about to say I have said since episode one of season one of Sad Oligarch, and I've tried to dump it into people's heads where appropriate. Our so called Western superpowers are run by oligarchs as much as Russia. It's you might not call them that, and perhaps they're a little more crafty in how they
influence our day to day lives. But Western oligarchs are fucking us as much as our politicians are, particularly when it comes to the open and free media of the West. Often, our media, particularly the big publications, is structurally biased because big outlets sit inside big power networks, billionaires, influential families, private equity, and politically connected executive thoughts. These are a
menace for truly free journalism. Now, control might not look the same as it sometimes does in Russia, where for example, a Kremlin stooge might call up a paper, tell them to shut up, or even send the police to raid them, but it's still often very, very corrupt. Usually it's more of a deceptive control dog a little more behind the scenes. The owners of a publication might hire editors who share
their beliefs in political propaganda. They might spike investigations that could be awkward for their friends, or they simply might support a genocidal rogue state and as sure to dampen any criticism against said rogue state as it murders children with bombs paid for by a rapidly declining superpower. Then there's the soft control via access. Notice, these days you will not see as many reporters taking politicians to task properly in interviews or when scuttling over to the ridiculous
government press briefings. Why well, if they ruffle too many feathers, they will lose access, and they might even lose their beat at whichever publication they're at. So anyway, billionaire influence is rife. Take The Washington Post, for example, it's now owned by the possible demon Jeff Bezos, after he bought
it for two hundred and fifty million dollars. When the owner is a megawealthy corporate figure Bezos is worth around two hundred and fifty four billion, there's an obvious incentive to avoid any serious investigations that threaten the owner's network of goons. And of course, due to horrible work practices at Amazon. Listen to my series A Megacorp to hear all about that. Bezos does not want his reporters focused too heavily on regulation, antitrust, label organizing, defense contracting, stuff
like that. In the UK, the daily Male titles sit under the ownership of the Rothmere family. They control it all. So I want to purchase the very popular conservative newspaper, The Telegraph. Government documents discussing this proposed deal explicitly note plurality concerns. They're worried that one family's consolidation of media means consolidation of influence. Of course this is obvious, but
that's what our tax pays for. In the UK, for politicians to sit around writing up papers, they can be deeply concerned with then you've got the worst of the worst, the nightmarish demon hell that is the Murdoch Empire news court, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, The Times, The New York Post, The Sun and many more. They also control Fox Corporation, as I'm sure you're aware, Fox's opinion programming
and Murdoch's politics are so intertwined. Basically now a case study in partisan media power, influential political bias, and unfortunately they are very successful. The Murdoch family can and have literally influenced elections at the drop of a hat. I could go on and on about this sort of thing in the media, but you get the gist by now. A point being let's just remember that here in the West,
we are not holier than thou. We suffer very similar problems with corruption and oligarchy, even if our media often chooses to sugarcoat it because that will benefit their owners. Now let's get back to Yevgeny Safronov. It's worth noting that before he had to go into exile from Russia, he was actually detained. In twenty twenty one, authorities brought him in for reporting on Novalni's court trial and criminal
case in Russia. Now if you don't remember, Alexi Navalni was Russia's most prominent anti corruption campaigner and opposition figure to Putin. He was known for exposing shenanigans at the elite level in the Kremlin, to put it lightly, and he survived a twenty twenty nerve agent poisoning, which is very clearly an act of the Russian regime. Navalny was lauded as a hero in the West, but if you dig in a little deeper, he did have a pretty checkered past. But that's not to say he deserved anything
that the Kremlin did to him. He eventually died in February twenty twenty four in a very remote Arctic prison colony, while serving a hefty sentence widely viewed internationally as a politically motivated punishment dished out by a Putin for Novalni's outspoken opposition to him. During the trial, Saffronov got caught up in the mix and was arrested. He was released, and there's not a lot of details on why. Surgery has a theory.
I think again it might have been more to do with the publication that he was working for. I couldn't see that he did anything like specifically like out there that would have him targeted. They were pretty adamant in reporting on it, calling out the government and stuff, and I think maybe just being the publication that it was was enough for him to be kind of targeted. And again the entire publication got labeled as a foreign agent, which essentially lets Russia do pretty much anything with it,
you know, kind of arrest arrest there reporters. I mean, I think just for propaganda purposes. It's like, oh, this publication's influenced, is owned by the West, their foreigners. They're trying to like disablize Russia. They're trying to say Russia is bad. That's kind of their go to to this crediting media.
Okay, now it's time for a quick break. All right, enough for that. Now back to the shot.
You see this even more often now with the war in Ukraine. I think at this point most publications have left Russia. But at the beginning of the war, the foreign agent thing was easily thrown around to just be like, oh, they're reporting that we're doing well in the war. That's because they're supporting Western propaganda.
So what do we know. We know that Yevgeny Safronov had several marks on his name as far as the Kremlin was concerned. One, he used to work for an opposition news outlet whose rich and powerful owner was a former friend turned foe of Putin. Two he reported on the Navoni trial, pointing out the trumped up charges and political motivations of the case. Three he was detained by authorities in twenty twenty one for what is essentially wrong speak.
Four fled Russia as it was at war with Ukraine, a big no no. And five he lived in exile where he continued to report on Putin's crimes. But is this enough to get him killed outside of Russia? Honestly, I just don't think so. No disrespect to the Ladyevgeny Saffronov, not at all. But he was not a huge influential reporter. His work was sure and steady, But it's not like he was known for dismantling the Russian regime with his reportage. But what about his claims of being hacked. There's two
sides to this. Notably, the Russians around him say that he was becoming paranoid, he was thinking things aren't real. Essentially, he was losing the plot a bit. However, the French police have a different view. The investigation is, of course quietly on go. The cops haven't said much, believe me, We've tried to talk to them, but the little they
did say cast the paranoia claims into doubt. According to the French newspaper Laparisian police investigators believe Saffronov had been at the target of death threats, real ones, not paranoia. At the time of recording these French police have not stated a final conclusion to what went on in Paris. Russian media, though, seems to have already decided.
Interestingly, Russian reports on this death label it as like, yep, the police said it's a suicide, I need to look further, whereas French autists clearly state that the investigation is ongoing and they're looking into this, and then they're treating this as I don't think they went as far as to say suspicious, but they said that, like, while suicide is being considered, other things are being investigated. Maybe we'll hear something about it in a few weeks, who knows, maybe months.
The alleged hacking also becomes more interesting when we dig a bit deeper. Safronov strangely, in my opinion, spoke about his social media being hacked and his simcards cloned in a suicide note. Honestly, it's really not that difficult to do in this day and age, simswapping, key loggers, social engineering, whatever. There are teenagers in their bedrooms doing this every single day, and they make money while they're at it. But it wasn't just the phones and the socials that got hacked.
Safronov's Russian citizen Gateway was also taken over. This is an online government portal in Russia that allows its people to log in and access municipal services. Basically an all in one digital hub for accessing official systems. This is not easy to hack into. Have to be seriously skilled to break Russian government cyber security. Either that or you'd have to be Russian cybersecurity. I don't think it's too crazy to theorize that maybe someone working for the Kremlin
was tasked with making Saffronov's life hell from afar. After all, Russia's relationship with computer hackers is pretty cozy. The state basically tolerates serious hacking so long as they don't target anything Russian. There are cases where hackers that have been caught doing so are given a choice. Either you face the consequences in court and got to prison, or you get to continue hacking, but now you work for the Kremlin. At the center of this ecosystem the security services, specifically
the FSB and the GIU. These agencies have long understood that their country produces a deep pool of technically gifted programmers, many of whom drift quickly into cybercrime. Rather than wiping that scene out, the state applies pressure selectively. This creates a grazon. Some groups operate as criminals for profits, others as patriotic volunteers, and some shift roles depending on the job. They're fluid. For example, during geopolitical flare ups, criminal groups
suddenly pivot to politically useful targets. During quieter periods, they return to ransomware and frauds and whatever else it is they do. This setup gives the Kremlin ap plausible deniability. Attacks can be framed as independent criminal hits even when they line up neatly with Russia's strategic interests, which they often do. It's cheap, flexible, deniable. The trade off is control. Then, Saffronov was pushed out of the window, but in a
different way. It wasn't the hands of Putin henchmen that shoved him, but a targeted hacking campaign that sent him over the edge. As far as psychological pressure operations go, this is not at all implausible. Just take a look at what the CIA and the FBI were up to in America in the seventies and eighties and onward. None of this ever truly ceased, and no governments are immune to attacking their own citizens, especially not Russia. This has
been sad Oligarch season two. Honestly, it's been absolute chaos. Sergei Slipchenko, Victor Mihail and myself have never had to dig so deep for so few leads. One thing that's clear after doing this series is that unfortunately the Kremlin's violent tactics are working. People are much more scared to speak out. The strange deaths become more brazen, the threat becomes more apparent. What's more, Putin is still murdering people across the world, and no one who can is willing
to stop him. It's sad to say, but we're in for some very hard times ahead. I would like to dedicate this series to all the people who fought and died in Ukraine trying to free themselves from the grip of Russia's violent imperialism. Especially to the friends I made when reporting out there. Those who died heroically on the front lines, Rest in peace to Yuriso Malenko, Ramasova and our friend are popular front mag dump. This is the end of sad Oligach. Thank you for listening. You've been
listening to sad Oliga season two. Produced by H eleven Studios for Cool Zone Media. Writing, editing, producing, concept and recording by myself, Jake Hanrahan, Research and reporting by Sergei Slipchenko, me and Victim Mihail. Executive producing by Sophie Lichtman. Music by Sam Black, art work by George Zutful. Sound mixed by Splicing Block. See my other projects at Hanrahan dot tv. Get me on social media at Jake Wonder School Hanrahn. That's h A N I M h A n.