Russia’s Investigative Committee says former transport minister Roman Starovoit just turned up dead looks like a self-inflicted gunshot wound, but honestly, who even knows anymore with these guys?
So, picture this: earlier Monday, Putin fires him. Boom, gone. Didn’t say why, just replaced him with Deputy Transport Minister Andrei Nikitin, no ceremony, no fuss. The committee’s now poking around, trying to piece together what happened, but you know Russian investigations good luck getting a straight answer.
Starovoit only got the transport minister gig in May 2024. Before that, he was governor of Kursk region for, what, almost six years? Not the easiest job lately. Remember back in August 2024, when Ukrainian troops shocked everyone and grabbed a chunk of Kursk? Moscow only just clawed that territory back, and even then, Kyiv was still hanging onto a sliver of land inside Russia by late June. Wild times.
Oh, and it gets messier. His replacement as governor, Aleksey Smirnov, barely warmed the chair before getting busted for allegedly swiping cash meant for building border fortifications. According to Kommersant (which, let’s be honest, usually has the inside scoop), Starovoit was about to be roped in as a defendant in the same corruption case. Not a good look.
Nobody seems to know exactly when Starovoit died. The head of the State Duma Defence Committee, Andrei Kartapolov, told RTVI it happened “quite a while ago,” which is vague as hell. Classic.
And, just to add another layer of Kremlin double-speak, before news of Starovoit’s death broke, reporters grilled Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, about whether the firing meant Putin didn’t trust Starovoit anymore, especially after the Kursk debacle. Peskov basically shrugged and said, “Well, if it was a trust thing, we’d have said so. We didn’t.” So, take that for what it’s worth.