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.

Died of heart failure, died of carbonnoxide poisoning.

How comes they are they?

Dozens of Russian oligachs, politically motivated millionaires have died in the space for 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.

September eighth, twenty twenty five.

A bridge in Kaliningrad.

The Kaliningrad region is an unusual place.

It's Russian territory, but it's completely encircled by European countries.

It's like an island, only instead of being surrounded by water, it's surrounded by Poland and Lithuania, countries that both have serious hostilities with Russia NATO countries.

This six thousand square mile exclave is over four hundred miles from the Russian border.

Still, Kaliningrad answers directly to the Kremlin.

It's Russia, just not mainland Russia.

It's been like this for a while.

Originally, though Kaliningrad was part of the Kingdom of Prussia, thought of proto Germany that began in the seventeen hundreds.

Back then it was called Koenigsburg.

Was eventually seized in nineteen forty five by the Soviet Union at the end of World War Two.

The Communists kicked most of the Germans out and gave the region the new name Kaliningrad.

The namesake is a nod to the Soviet politician Mikhail Kalinin.

Kalinin, who rose from peasant by to be President of the Supreme Council.

When the USSA collapsed in nineteen ninety one, Kaliningrad became part of the new Russia.

It's remained that way ever since.

Of course, a strategically important area for the Kremlin, a highly militarized fly in Europe's ointment.

It's here in Kaliningrad's Gurievsky area, where a body of forty three year old entrepreneur Alexi.

Sinitsin is laid out under a bridge.

His limbs are stiff, is positioned on the bank of a small river.

He's dead, very dead.

His body is missing one vital component.

It's head.

Snitsin has been decapitated.

The nailed up spine sticks out from a gaping wound at the neck.

Strangely, the head is not near the body, it's some distance away.

Next to this gruesome scene is a carefully coiled towing cable high strength nylon rope made for pulling vehicles.

Polisa called after this nightmare is discovered by passers by crops arrive not the scene, and then their rapport.

They write that.

Its quote could be a suicide.

How Sennitskin managed to cut off his own head, I don't know.

The toe rope is thick, woven, dull.

It's not like a piano or razor wire, which in theory, could maybe decapitator man if he used it as a noose.

But then how would the body end up on the riverbank with its head in another location?

It could be a suicide, but that is very unlikely, it seems.

The police are also not so sure.

They open a criminal investigation into the case, mostly citing the tow cable suspicious evidence.

Such a grizzly scene creates a lot of questions.

First and foremost for us, who the hell was Sinnitsin?

A death as brutal as this does not happen on a whim.

We've been working on this case tirelessly, and the simple answer is so Knitsin is a bit of a ghost.

Very little information is out there about him, no real social media presence, no record of his childhood, no real effort made to follow up on the report of his death.

Even by the standards of the Kremlins Russia, it's very unusual.

I reached out to people associated with him and I got nothing.

Every single time brick Wall, You'd think someone would at least want to make sure the correct impression was given about this man after he was left headless under a bridge.

This is not a normal death.

Researcher Victi Mihiel, who's working on this with us, managed to dig out some information, but honestly, there is not a lot out there.

We have no clue and no information about this guy.

If you look him up, you cannot find any information other than his birthplace and some very vague stuff such as that he appeared in Russia two times on records, once when he was born in Vorkuta in nineteen eighty two, if I'm not mistaken, and the second one when he self proclaimed as an entrepreneur in twenty fourteen in Saint Petersburg.

Well, there is a bit of a distance between Saint Petersburg and Kaliningrad, right in twenty sixteen he moved randomly in Kaliniingrad twenty eighteen started to work for this K potash company, and in twenty twenty two, just four years later, somehow he became the general director the company.

Victor mentions here K potash is something I'll get to in a bit related to soap mines and fertilizer.

Keep it in the back of your mind, though, as it may hold some answers as to why Senitzin died the way he did.

There is no information about his studies, parents, whatever, what makes him eligible to work as a director.

When you need studies, when you need a diploma in economics, you need to be even an engineer.

I'm saying because an engineer, because this guy was literally making projects, as in engineering projects of the minds which did these extractions and whatnot.

But what I was saying, at some point in the Colini Grad collective unconsciousness, people thought, wow, I wonder if we have a director for this company, because for some reason nobody knew the director was from twenty to twenty two, twenty twenty five where this person was to beheaded.

This is another interesting point Victors brought up here.

Not only is Senitsan's past highly elusive, so are the records of some of the places he worked at.

It says if he floated in as a specter and took with him everyone's memories as he left.

Maybe it's just bad record keeping in Kaliningrad.

Maybe Russia, in all of its iterations throughout history, has been a place of meticulous record keeping.

They're literally known for it.

From Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union to post USSR collapse and now Planet Putin, bureaucracy has always been a big part of the Russian experience.

They're great record keepers, but they're also selective record keepers.

When it helps state, red take and minute details are all very important, but when it doesn't help the state, everything suddenly vanish.

It many such cases when the Soviet Union went belly up.

For example, Russia eventually ended up restricting access to the Soviet era archives.

Courts would unlawfully limit the records so researchers couldn't uncover the true horrors of the USSR.

They'd reclassified documents, hide them, destroy them, or simply say they got lost along the way.

Another example is the twenty sixteen drug scandal, when a state run doping program for Russian Olympic athletes was exposed.

It was found that the Russian government was guaranteeing that the tests that came back positive for performance enhancing drugs were hidden.

There was an institutional effort that made any incriminating documents disappear.

Okay, now it's time for a quick outbreak.

All right, enough of that, now back to the shore.

You get my point.

Records have regularly vanished into the ether in Russia when they might expose stay wrongdoing.

Don't get me wrong, though, This is not just a Russian problem.

It is a political problem all across the world, left right up, down center.

Everybody is at it.

Just take the so called Epstein files for example.

The US government on all sides has or is actively hiding important evidence that exposes the involvement of the rich and power full in the world's worst known pedophile human trafficking ring.

Try to get your head around that these are people who talk about the morals of their government and excoriate their foes, and yet they are knowingly taking part in an open cover up to help some of the worst people on earth.

It's absolutely diabolical, It's corrupt, and sadly, I don't think it will ever change.

Anyway.

I digress.

Still, the fact that this all takes place in Cliningrad might be why things are a little difficult to decipher.

It's not exactly an area that has the spotlight.

In fact, it's not a place many people in euro have been too atall.

A holiday destination, is not.

I actually tried to go to Kaliningrad myself in twenty seventeen.

At the time, there were rumors that the state had been fortifying the borders and bringing more heavy weapons into the area.

I wanted to go and see what I could verify and write a story on it.

As a journalist, I had to apply for a visa.

I was denied.

Later I was told that the reason for this was my recent report in the so called Denetsk People's Republic or the DNR.

This is one of the most contentious separatist held areas in East Ukraine.

The Russian back militias controlling the area framed it as some kind of post Soviet utopia.

They even brought in hardline communist extremists from across Europe to live there and help spread international propaganda.

It was very weird.

Now I had an inklin.

It wasn't quite the war torn red paradise they made out, so I traveled over to see for myself.

As soon as I arrived, I was assigned a group of minders who took me on a three day press tour of the region.

We've been allowed permission here on condition.

That we have a minder, so basically they take us to the people they want us to speak to.

It's very controlled, but we've come here anyway because these guys no longer see themselves.

I couldn't go freely myself anywhere.

It was essentially a North Korea style propaganda campaign.

In real time.

They put on a show to make it seem as if everything was running great and that the only issue was the Ukrainians attacking them.

But every staged event they took me to fell apart.

Something would go wrong, and the minders would just hope that I didn't notice.

Okay, can we go in.

For example, when they took me to an old lady's house that had been bombed, they prompted her to tell me how much she loved the then separatist leader of the DNA, Zakachenko.

Only problem was when they presented her with a newspaper with a full page image of Zakachenko.

She didn't know who he was.

Then.

This sweet Bubushka also accidentally let on that the house they were showing us around that wasn't actually hers.

She lived in a different house in the same compound.

She was being used for propaganda and forced to lie for the camera.

In the evenings, the one hotel I was allowed to stay at became a human trafficking hub.

Big men with flattheads entered the restaurant bar area with a dozen or so young women.

They would offer these women up like cattle to anyone willing to pay.

Surprise, surprise, the.

Local comrades had no qualms about this at all.

If that wasn't bad enough, my DNR minders also faked a gun battle at a front line position whilst there They literally told me the shooting will begin soon.

Movement for soldiers.

And that is that incoming, And sure enough bullets flew past our heads as we ducked into a trench.

I covered many wars by this point, and I knew that's just not how it works.

Front Lines are, of course, by nature, very unpredictable.

At this scene, the DNA commanders explained how the Ukrainians were constantly violating the ceasefire.

Only the gunfire was coming from an opposite burm across the way, which I knew was the DNR position.

I even checked it when I got back, angulated it on the maps, got analysts to check it out.

It was DNR position.

No Ukrainians there.

The whole thing was staged to influence my reporting.

Luckily I twigged early on, and we've been filming every fuck up on the slide.

Long story short, I made a documentary showing that the DNR is an authoritarian shitthle ran by Russian commanders and local organized criminals.

Now, even though Russia was then pretending they were actually nothing to do with the DNR, I was subsequently not granted permission to enter Kiliningrad or any other Russian territory at that time.

All of this is relevant to understanding the psyche of the Kremlin.

In practical terms, when it comes to on the ground manipulation, they have no qualms.

I mean, just quickly take the DNR for example.

Again, all of the leaders who run place when I was there in twenty seventeen have since died in targeted assassinations right there in the DNA.

The Russians of course blame Ukraine, but trust me, there is a stack of evidence which suggests it was the Kremlin who took out their own useful idiots when they were no longer needed.

So with all this in mind, I'm.

Sat here thinking to myself, is it possible that this kind of behavior is also happening in Kaliningrad.

Honestly I don't know, but I do want to speak to someone who's actually been there.

As I said, I didn't make it there.

So I reached out to journalist Sam Farley, who went to Kaliningrad in twenty eighteen.

I guess, firstly, just if you can't explain why you went to Cliningrad.

The World Cup that Russia held in twenty eighteen, England played there against Belgium.

This is weird atmosphere that, like, the place is quite weird itself.

We went drove into the.

Country and drove out again from Poland, and that border took hours to get over.

And I think whenever I think about it now and think how difficult it must be.

Now, every place I've ever been to has like some positives.

It's not the It's not the nicest place.

I understand, Like people keep saying, it's this kind of brutallest place.

Is it as bad as it sounds?

Like gray concrete and all that.

Gray concrete is just the perfect scrypted words for it.

The only nice splash of color I can remember was like there there was like a McDonald's that was really lit up well, and it's just red and yellow, and like, genuinely that's the only color in the whole place, Like it's it's incredibly depressing.

It almost felt the other kind of moment I kind of remember really well in terms of colors.

We were staying at the top of a sort of tower block and at the bottom was a shisha bar and kind of walking back to the place, walking to and from the place every day.

The place was gray.

It was the weather wasn't particularly good either, which didn't help.

The sky was gray, the buildings are gray, and there was just this sort of like luminous green kind of light emanating from the shisha bar, and that's all you really saw was was lights from shop fronts.

It's very depressing, and it's not in a.

It's not kind of Russian or Soviet in like a kind of fun interesting way like Transnistria.

It's so weird but.

Really fun kind of kitchen like it's that's really interesting place.

Whereas this just felt depressing.

Okay, now it's time for a quick outbreak, all right.

Not for that, now back to the short.

It felt like every bad part of Russia combined, and it lacked the vibrancy of any of the other Russian cities I've visited at that tournament or I've been too for that, and.

Even the people just they just well kind of very.

Wire not particularly friendly, like keeping themselves themselves.

Did you feel at all that there was this kind of Russian military presence?

To be honest, I didn't feel that on the street at all.

Anytime I would say I did think like shit, this is this is a bit unusually.

It's kind of when we did go through that border.

Crossing it was stacked with soldiers and all sorts of sort of military now or security or whatever, and I did kind of think this is obviously.

I know they had invaded playing like four years prior to that.

He didn't feel like Europe was on like a war setting at that point.

Going through that border, I was genuinely quite surprised.

Every other kind of route I'd gone into Russia, I'd done it through air and then it just felt like every every airport was the same as any other airport in the world.

Yeah, crossing did feel very, very kind of defined, and a lot are if I'm honest.

So that's the backdrop for where this horrific death took place, decapitated amongst the concrete and brutalism.

Before his untimely death, Alexi Sanitsin was the CEO of k Potash, the company that dealt with different types of natural minerals in the region.

It's a bit confusing what Sannitzin was in charge of where, so let's speak to surgery to clarify.

He's most definitely smart than I am.

One thing that is confusing me, right, So some media, and this is both Russian media or at least like Russian focused.

One says that he was the CEO of a salt mine, and another says he was the CEO of a fertilizer company.

Have you worked out what's what there is that like the same company with different parts and people are getting the wrong end of the stick.

I can't work it out.

It's like a company and then has a subsidiary.

From my understanding, he's kind of in charge of both, and the both things are kind of true because so potash is what he's like the project that's supposed to mine potash, which is essentially salt.

I mean it's more complex than that, but basically just minerals on the ground and they're used for fertilizer.

So essentially potash is extremely vital to agriculture.

Back in I think it was twenty twenty three to twenty four, the war in Ukraine kind of affected a lot of export of potash and attackted a lot of countries.

I believe it was in Africa and some other southern countries.

They were near like famine just because they couldn't get this fertilizer and the basically messed up all the crop.

So it's a big deal.

It's it's a big industry and Russia was actually, i believe the biggest or the second biggest exporter in the world before the war started, and they had a major kind of collapse because you know, they a lot of their customers were the West, and they all got sent they all started sentioning Russia, So that industry had took a big hit.

So let's work out what could have got Sinitsin into hot water.

The first lea there is what Sergey just mentioned.

Russia's potash industry nose dive in after it was hit with war related sanctions.

That is obviously going to affect a man who's the CEO of the biggest potash company in Kaliningrad.

But even by Krimlin standards, they could hardly blame sinits In for this.

They're the ones that decided to invade Ukraine.

Either way, the issue resolved itself.

After the initial dip, the potash trade stabilized.

Actually in some regions it became even more profitable due to scarcity.

Russia worked around the sanctions and for them everything was fine.

For some reason, though the profits of k potash did not reflect this.

Sinitsin's company was losing money hand over fist.

K Potash, who.

Sinitsen worked for, was the head of with both companies since October twenty twenty two.

He was not exactly helping the company's financial situation, right, Like from the nodes we have here, like he was in a very dire financial situation.

Yeah, so what kind of happened is it sounds like there's basically a plan to.

Create a factory.

From my understanding, it's not fully operational yet and he's basically going around from the city, so from Kalingrad to the locals and kind of trying to make this thing work.

Now, this is interesting.

Sanitsen was getting pushed back locally.

He needed to rapidly expand the operations of K Potash, but the people did not want the new factories on their land.

K Potash went on a pr offensive to try and win over the residents, to let everyone know how many new jobs that would provide, how lucrative it would be for the town, and even paid for a big mural to be painted.

They paid homage to a Soviet era fighter pilot.

None of it worked.

The people weren't having it.

They could not be swayed this easy.

This wasn't just some town hall meeting either.

Locals actually took to the streets to protest k potash.

They were very angry.

There was an incident where the residents basically, the residents don't want any like construction, mining, et cetera kind of going on around them.

It can be pretty destructive you have to like dig up, you know, like one of those giant like mining holes.

It would be like a pretty large effect.

In the community.

And they actually stood up against it.

They kind of the local said we don't want this year putin ended up stepping in.

Well, you know, the government stepped in.

They always kind of referred that like this issue got risen to putin and he stepped in, and they basically did like assessment.

The residents wanted like canceled.

They wanted the project completely canceled.

But what ended up happening is they basically moved it a few I think it was just like a few kilometers down from the initial location.

So they were like, Okay, this is still happening, but I guess we'll just move it over a bit.

I believe it was the.

Mine itself and the processing plant.

So it was supposed to be kind of like the entire operation in one place they got slightly moved down, which you know was kind of like a victory for those residents, but it also didn't really address like it's still happening just a little further off.

So, Surge, you just mentioned, it's at this stage that the Russian government on the mainland became made away of the issue so much so that they got involved directly.

Could this potentially be the turning point that led to Sinitsyn's death.

We don't know, but there was a lot more scandal to come.

Remember that, mind, we were just talking about.

Well, it's still not being finished.

Even with the new construction location.

It's actually still in the design stage.

K Potash didn't manage to fully sway the locals even after the Kremlin got involved.

They're still angry.

The estimated date for the project's completion is now over a decade delayed from when it was originally meant to be finished.

It won't be done, they say until maybe twenty thirty two.

And how long it.

Will take them to recoup the losses is anyone's guess.

God knows.

Kay Potash needs the money right now.

The company's bottom line is in the toilet they're working at a negative of three point four billion rubles that's around forty two million dollars.

Their assets are a loss of fifteen billion rubles one hundred and eighty five million dollars.

K Potash, which Sinitsen was running until his untimely death, has more debt than it has assets, and it is not making money.

If that wasn't bad enough, k Potash has investors at the door.

They want their money.

There are at.

Least thirty three legal cases.

Against the company because of course they can't afford to pay.

If Sad the Oligarch has taught us anything is that you probably don't want to owe money to anything involved with Russian state agricultural projects.

Trust me on this.

Along with all this, there will been several other strange issues attached to k Potash.

For example, a water supply company tried to extort them out of around two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, claiming the company it was using more water than what they did.

Seems like everybody in that region is on the take.

Then there's the case of a journalist K Potash actually got.

Sent to prison.

He was writing negative articles about them because well, they were doing a lot of negative stuff.

In a strange turn of events, k Potash claims the reporter blackmailed the company, saying he'd stop the articles if they gave him one million rubles around twelve grand.

This journalist was sent to prison for three years over this and his publication was shut down.

To this day, he says he's innocent and was quote framed for his crime.

Very dodgy situation.

Now, none of this points in any one direction other than total chaos.

It seems as if Ka Potash is an absolute disaster from the ground up.

They even got.

Fined in twenty twenty one for filing documents to the wrong government body.

Alex Knitzin did not have his ship in order whatsoever.

With a company like Kay Potash in a place like Kleningrads, I think it's safe to say that it's no stretch to imagine there might have been unsavory characters involved who are owed.

Money, a lot of money.

Could this be wise?

And Knitsin had his head cut off and was dumped under a bridge, after all, he was the CEO.

Not saying he should ever come to harm, but if there's anyone to blame for the catastrophic financial losses.

It's obviously him.

Still, the police of the region are leaning publicly into the claims of a suicide, but at the same time they have opened up a potential murder case.

Whilst confusing, at least they are doing their jobs properly, or at least it looks like that.

It's all very closed off still.

But what we have found out though, is that they've used this investigation to confiscate documents from the offices.

Of k Potash.

We also know that examinations have been ordered and colleagues and relatives of Sinitsin are being interviewed.

Naturally, the police no more than they're letting on.

In another report talking about Sinitsin, we found the following statement quote The enterprise itself is quite closed, non public in nature, and its general director was not present in any way in the Killiningrad public space.

He did not give any interviews.

Most heads of enterprises of this level are visible.

I can't say the same about Senitsin end quote.

As I said at the start, he was a very private man.

Whilst this case is puzzling, we still don't know one quite crucial detail.

Where was Sinitsin's head found In all of the reports from the police and the media.

They just state that the head was found in another place.

Was that next to the body in the river or twenty meters down the road?

We just don't know.

I think that detail would tell us a lot.

There are also still no real images of the crime scene, no further reports from the press, and no quotes from eyewitnesses.

This to me shocking from such a brutal and unusual death.

Because opaik as all of this is, I've come to think that whatever happened to Alexi Sinitsin is one of two scenarios.

There was a brutally violent murder.

The victim's head was cut from the body and then dumped in a public place to send a message, likely connected to some kind of organized crime, the state, or both.

Or it was the most unlikely suicide in Kliningrad's history.

You decide.

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, artwork by George Jutful sound mixed by splicing Block.

See my other projects at Hanrahan dot tv.

Get me on social media at jake Underscore Hanrahan, that's h A N R A H A M.

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