On February twenty fourth, twenty twenty two, Russian forces crossed over the border into Ukraine with heavy weapons and armored vehicles. This was stage one of Putin's full scale invasion of Ukraine. His plan was to quickly sweep across the country and take the capital of Kiev. It didn't quite go like that, though Ukrainians fought back. They formed volunteer militia forces, backed top the military, and campaigned for better weapons from the West.
Three years into the war and Russia is still nowhere near Kiev. Thousands have died on the battlefield and civilian infrastructure is targeted every week, but still Ukraine is holding strong. As is the case with any war, peculiar things began to happen after the invasion. 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.
Something that caught my eye in particular, though, was a little bit stranger than all of this. I noticed that there was a verst number of Russian oligarchs who started falling out of windows. If it was a windows, it was some other clumsy or extremely violent death. So I got in touch with my friend and colleague, Sergei Slipchenkov. He's a Ukrainian journalist who speaks both Russian and English fluently. We'd been on the ground at working in Kiev the
week of the invasion. He agreed, as to many other journalists at the time, that this was really weird. Together, we dug deeper into the deaths of these rich Russian power brokers. What we found was an unprecedented number of accidents, suicides, and violent murders, sending oligarchs to their grave. Now, we don't particularly care if some Russian oligarch dies, but to understand these weird kremlinink deaths is to proper understand Putin
and what he's up to. It was clear a pattern was emerging and we wanted to document it, and so sad Oligarch was born. Since we finished season one, the millionaires and billionaires keep dropping like flies. So get ready for sad Oligarch Season two, an investigative podcast that focuses on the mysterious deaths of Russia's Kremlin linked power brokers. Listen to sad Oligarch on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts