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 comes you are they?

Dozens of Russian oligarchs politically motivated millionaires have died in the space of three years, most of them in suspicious circumstances.

Many have hidden links to the Kremlins.

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 Slipchenkok.

This is a H eleven studio and Coolso Media production.

August three, a rocket scientist by the name of Vitally Melnikov is laid in a Moscow hospital bed.

He's trapped under a nest of medical tubes and wires that are keeping him alive.

Seventy seven years old, Melnikov is hardly in the prime of his life.

Death is imminent.

At some point in the past four weeks, Melnikov managed to consume poison mushrooms.

When your body digests deadly mushrooms.

The poison spreads through your blood.

Fast toxins head straight for the liver and the kidneys.

They bind to enzymes in the cells the body needs to produce proteins.

Once this happens, the cells shut down that protein synthesis.

You start to die.

Just twenty four hours after consuming the poison mushrooms, Melnikov began via throwing up.

He was chronically unwell, profuse, sweating, intense stomach cramps, blood in the toilet.

His body dehydrated first, blood pressure tanked, heart going like the Clappers, total dizziness and disorientation.

The day later in his liver is being disintegrated by the toxins.

He goes yellow jaundice, His kidneys fail, he gets nosebleeds that don't stop for ages.

It's blood one clot now within a weak.

Multiple organs begin to fail, lungs, liver, skin sepsis moves to the gut.

The gut leaks caustic bacteria into the bloodstream and in and out cycle of toxins destroying the body.

The liver tries to cleanse itself and recycle the poison, but instead it concentrates it and makes the damage, worse and worse.

Despite the critical care Melnikov receives at the Moscow Intensive care unit, it's far too late.

He's got brain swelling, internal bleeding, full organ shutdown.

The rocket scientist slides off his mortal coil and enters the Cosmos for real dead.

No, you might be wondering why Vitali Melnikov is in this series.

It was not a billionaire Russian lobbyist or anything like that.

As I've said, he worked in the rocket, energy and space exploration industry, not as a man behind a desk, caching dodgy checks or stealing from the coffers, but as an actual hands on scientist.

Monokov's demise was, however, possibly one of the many sad Oligarch deaths, at least that's what we've come to believe.

Remember, the sad Oligarch umbrella covers the many branches of what could well be a large scale Kremlin policy of assassinating its own people, possibly a real conspiracy with a Russian elite clears its house with blood.

But still, why would someone in the darkest depths of the Russian deep state want to kill a rocket scientist.

Well, considering the expertise that such a role requires.

There could actually be many different reasons a man like Melnikov might end up in murky waters, advanced weapons systems, propulsion technology.

Who knows what a rocket scientist ends up working on, Especially when the government is involved, The possibilities are endless.

We think it might be connected to something much more obvious, though.

Lunar twenty five Russia's first lunar probe mission in forty seven years.

This moonlanding expedition failed spectacularly on August twentieth, twenty twenty three.

A week later, Melnikov was dead.

Three Russia's first moon mission in forty seven years has failed.

The Lunar twenty five spacecraft spun out of control and crashed into the Moon after a problem preparing for pre landing orbit.

Russia's state space corporation ross Cosmos, said it had lost contact with the craft.

In a statement, it said quote the apparatus moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the Moon.

It added that a special into departmental commission had been formed to investigate the reasons behind the loss of Luna twenty five.

Best the reasons behind the loss.

Of the five.

When Surgery and me looked into this, our first thought was that the two are possibly connected, Like, how serious was this crashing into the moon?

This lunar twenty five, this big space mission, the first one in almost half a century for Russia and then it crashes?

Can you kind of explain what actually happened?

Yeah, So when I was looking into this, actually monetarily, like it's a a big of a loss, it was around one hundred and thirty million USD right for the whole project.

I thought it would be a couple maybe even billion.

I think the conversion is like twelve billion rubles by no means small, but it's also kind of on the smaller side of like the fans aerospace projects, right, the bigger thing is one hundred percent the kind of symbolism.

So initially this project was started in the like nineteen nineties, they were already talking about it, like a design was chosen or at least they were kind of like looking at designs in like the nineteen nineties.

By nineteen ninety eight they selected like I think, like the design that was going to go forward with, but it kind of died down in two thousands.

I think they were just focusing on other stuff at that time, and it was kind of like in like limbo.

It looks like it picked back up in twenty tens.

Initially the project was actually called like Luna Globe, so like Globe Moon whatever.

Basically it was a different name, right, It was kind of not associated with the Soviet program until it was changed to Luna twenty five, kind of having that continuity with the Soviet Union, even though the last the Luna twenty four, like the one before that, was actually launched in nineteen seventy six, right, so like the reason they're naming it twenty five is to have that connection to the Soviet Union.

In Russia, they're very much you know, the whole nostalgia thing is like very capitalized on.

Soviet Union was the good old times.

It's when Russia was like on par with the United States, you know, the only kind of.

Rival to the big bad US, right, like a spiritual successor project.

Yeah, exactly.

The space race was like a really big thing.

It still is.

It's still a very much like point of pride.

They'll love to point out that, oh, yeah, the US land and on the moon, but we did this, We send the first man, we sent the first like woman, we did this, we did that.

It's still looked back on as like kind of like a great achievement, and they see it as like very you know, like Russia as a successor of the Soviet Union, So they kind of play on that.

That's the whole reason it's Luna twenty five, Like it was renamed, you know, like it was initially a different thing, and they intentionally renamed it to Luna twenty five to have that connection.

There's like a national pride, right Like, yeah, like the one hundred and thirty million is a lot, but I think more so it's more of like showing that Russia is still a big boy.

They can send things into space, right'.

That's kind of like a mark of a great nation as they see it.

The mission has raised hopes in Moscow that Russia was returning to the big power moon race, but this failure has underscored the decline of Russia's space power since the glory days of Cold War competition.

A Sergeimy was saying, without the full context, the theory that Melnikov was killed because of a failed moon landing might sound fetched, but if we look at the history of Russia and what the space race means to the country's hegemony.

Things look a lot less conspiratorial.

Let's go back to the beginning, the days of the Soviet Union, Red Army, boots on the ground, communist rule.

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

All right, enough for that.

Now back to the shop mother Russia in the nineteen forties World War Two.

Squalid goolags and a ruthless dictator.

If you don't get snitched on by your neighbor and sent to the dungeons, you might stab to death for thought crimes.

Welcome to the USSA socialist utopia, it is not.

The war against Nazi Germany was drawing to an end.

Soviet troops had taken Berlin, and Hitler blew his brains out of his head on April thirtieth, nineteen forty five.

The Soviets copied the Americans, and they capped Nazi rocket engineers and set them to work for the state.

This supercharged the ussa's long range missile programs and launched the next phase their plans to go into space.

In nineteen fifty seven, the Soviet Union launched the first ever artificial satellite into orbit Sputnik one.

It was an incredible feat of engineering that had the Yanks shaken in their boots.

A month after Spotnik one came Spotnik two.

This satellite went into space the same as the first, but they put a dog in it to test how the first living creature in orbit might fare.

This was the famous Lika the dog.

Laikas sadly died a horrible death just hours after launch, a malfunctioning thermal control mentally overheated.

Shocking, I know, but fans of the USSA don't know how to treat dogs.

But the sixties, the space race was in full swing.

The Cold War was heating up, and the Americans were desperate to be the first superpower to dominate space travel that were lacking on.

On April twelfth, nineteen sixty one, Russia sent the first human into orbit, Yuri Gagarin.

This was a victory for the Soviets.

The Americans were left sour faced, tinkering with their rockets and twiddling their thumbs.

Now, a retrospective, watered down telling of history might sometimes say that everything was just healthy competition.

It absolutely was not.

The space race between the USSR and the United States of America became an emblem of the global power struggle between both.

By the mid sixties, the Russians were still collecting stripes, launching the first human spacewalk, first shuttle soft landing, and the first multi person mission to the stars.

Why the only way for the US to recover from these Soviet space achievements was to put a man on the Moon first, And sure enough, on July twentieth, nineteen sixty nine, they did just that.

At US astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped onto the dusty earth of the Moon's surface and planted a big, fat American flag into the ground.

At this moment, the USSR had officially lost the space race.

After all of that, the capitalists beat them to it.

It was a big embarrassment for then Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

At this time, a sixteen year old of Vladimir Putin would have watched his country lose on the TV.

He'd have read about it in the papers, heard about it in the street.

First forward to the collapse of the Soviet Union nineteen ninety one.

By this time Putin was almost forty.

He was working in some capacity in the Saint Petersburg political administration.

Having recently got back from his KGB posting in East Germany with no funding, the Russian space program splinters.

You will have remembered all of this very well.

This goes towards explaining why Lunar twenty five was such a big deal.

Putin has spent his life trying to build his idea of a great Russian empire.

The old law of the cosmonaut space race is very much part of that.

He needed Lunar twenty five to be spectacular, something new for the history books for Russian space exploration.

And this mission was also supposed to be like a first It was supposed to be a first lander on the south pole of the Moon, not too into the whole, like a space exploration.

But for my understanding, that was supposed to be a kind of a difficult feat.

At least nobody tried it.

Nobody's been able to do it.

So that was kind of the idea.

And this project, even though like you know, it started back come in twenty tens, it just kept being delayed.

From my understanding, it was supposed to launch like at one point in twenty nineteen, it got delayed again at that point, like so they were working with other partners, like for example, Sweden pulled out.

Sweden was supposed to give them like some attack, I think, like something to look through samples on the moon.

They basically said, like you're taking too long.

They went with someone else.

At this point, the project is just kind of like keeps being delayed, keeps being delayed to the point where the war in Ukraine starts and essentially everybody kind of shuns Russia, right, everybody pulls out.

Tensions are high with the West, and nobody wants to work with Russia.

Which you know, they have their so use rockets and stuff, but a lot of the technology, a lot of the things that actually go into this tech, they're having a harder time sourcing.

That's something that I thought was really interesting.

If you're trying to work out, well, oh, why would Melnikov be maybe maybe why would it be maybe purposely poisoned?

It's just a scientist is to do with this in the greater context of the Soviet Union, like you said, and the fact that due to the war, all the people that will working kind of as international a political thing on this just went no, fuck that we're not working with Russia because of what they're doing I almost feel like surely puting and his mentality or anybody's mentality in that situation would be like, Okay, fuck it, we can do it ourselves, will show them and the embarrassment of it going boom crashing into the surface.

I think in that context it would have been a pretty big deal for the Kremlin.

You're spot on.

That's exactit.

Rhetoric they had, like Piskov was, you know, talking about it.

He's like, oh, we don't need the West, we can do this ourselves.

Kind of again going back to the Soviet Union, like we did it back then, we could do it now, you know, kind of ignoring that Soviet Union was a collection of a bunch of nations.

You know, they don't have all these resources that we're in other parts of the Soviet Union.

But anyway, yeah, it was very much.

It was very much in that light of this Russia is amazing.

It can do everything by itself.

It doesn't need anybody, It doesn't really like depend on anyone.

Right.

It was a lot of this calling back to the Soviet Union and kind of I guess you could even say, like a supremacist thing, like we're better than everyone.

We don't need anyone, We can do this ourselves.

So when this you know, big project again it was supposed to be at first it would have been another kind of achievement for Russian exploration, all of a sudden it's it goes wrong, it crashes, and not only does it crash, four days later, an Indian mission does the exact same thing, successfully making it the fourth country after China, Us and Russia to make a soft landing on the Moon, which is like, you know, a big technological achievement.

But not only do they do it on the Moon, it's on the South Pole where Russia was hoping to do it, so they get that first instead, you know, So not only did they did Russia fail, but now some like a nation that they see as inferior has also not only just achieved it, but did it first, and they kind of took that first from them.

That is a definitely relevant point.

I mean, as horrible as that is, let's be there is no way on earth that the Kremlin has any respect for the Indian space mission.

I dare say most countries don't.

And they actually did it successfully and did a good job of it.

That must have been a kind of salt in the wound moment right.

One hundred percent.

They see people from China, from India, like anywhere you know that isn't European as like kind of lesser.

How deep it is entrenched into the country, and government is like, you can debate that, but it's definitely there.

It's very much a supremacist right, like we're better, We're the better race nation.

Whatever.

So Russia's new space mission to the Moon's south pole smashed into the surface and broke to bits.

Then India beat them to it just four days later.

What disaster for Putin.

Someone had to be held responsible.

Okay, now it's time for a quick out break, all right, enough for that, now back to the shore.

Looking into this case specifically has been difficult.

Reporting on Vatally Melnikov's death from the Russian press was very surface level.

Things were kept mostly quiet.

The family aren't saying much, the hospital isn't speaking.

It's all a bit weird, especially when you consider the alleged cause of death, toxic mushroom poisoning.

The death by fungi element of this case is especially unusual.

According to his family, Melnikov had been picking wild mushrooms his whole life.

In the days before he was hospitalized, he'd been making a broth from what he'd foraged near his home in Moscow.

Nothing unusual there.

In Russia, picking mushrooms is simply part of the culture, especially for the older generation.

Remember, Melnikov was seventy seven years old when he died.

Seems unlikely to me that he'd accidentally pick a poison mushroom, boil it and eat it as an experienced micro file a mushroom forager.

To be fair, though, I know absolutely nothing about mushroom picking and the whole tradition and culture surrounding it, so I spoke to someone who does, Tommy Fitzpatrick.

Tommy is an expert on mushrooms.

He's been involved in this his whole life and he knows which ones to pick and which ones not.

To my mother's Polish and part of the Polish culture in quite a lot of Eastern Europe and Europe is to.

Go foraging for mushrooms.

And from as young as I can remember, I was giving a little pen knife and will go out in the forest every time we visited our family in Poland and mushrooms, so I learnt from an early age, and all of the mushrooms I was taught by my family.

I now know them plus much much more.

I've actually gone advanced and got obsessed with it, and no more than everyone who taught me about mushrooms.

So now they come to me for some mushroom micology knowledge.

So if you were walking through the forest, are you pretty confident you'd be able to identify pretty much any mushroom you'd see just by sight.

I wouldn't know all of them, but I know all the dangerous ones and all the best edibles.

That's how you want to tackle foraging mushrooms.

You need to know the most dangerous ones so you can avoid them, and then focus on the best edible ones.

The ones in between are the ones not worth bothering with.

But obviously, the more times you see some mushrooms that aren't edible or aren't even poisonous, you familiarize yourself with them, and then you might look them up in the book and find out what they are.

But focus on the deadly ones to avoid them, and then the best edibles.

That's what I'm really interested, obviously, because this Worstian scientist in his seventies ended up dying eating a poison mushroom.

Now you said yourself.

This is something that you grew up doing.

It's part of the culture in Poland.

I know, it's definitely part of the culture in Russia as well.

How likely is it do you think that someone would be picking mushrooms as part of their culture, especially in old age.

They've been doing it their whole life.

They suddenly pick a poison one by accident.

Is that something that happens often or is it rare?

Would you say it will happen.

People do die every year and it would be from accidentally picking the incorrect mushroom.

You have field mushrooms which are all edible, apart from one which looks exactly the same as the edible ones, but it's called the yellow stainer.

So the way you will test it is you'll cut this white mushroom in half or any way you like, and it will stain yellow, and if it doesn't, then you know you've got an edible mushroom.

Also, it's got a bad smell compared to the other edible button mushrooms or field mushrooms.

But yeah, it's quite interesting you talk about Russia because a lot of the mushrooms which you wouldn't bother with, or they have toxins in so you wouldn't pick them.

For example, the Russians sometimes will pick them and they'll boil the mushroom to take out the toxins and then make it palatable and edible.

But for me, you know that's going a bit far.

You just again, I just focus on the best edibles, not making things edible.

And then in terms of the most deadly mushroom in the world is the deaf cap mushroom and I believe that's probably what the Russian guy you're talking about would have been targetable.

How many deadly poison mushrooms are there?

Is there loads out there?

You have to be careful or is it now?

And then like what are the levels to it because I don't know anything about it.

Well, in the UK there's probably five deadly mushrooms and then lots that will make you sick.

In science, everything has a Latin name, So for example, the deaf cat mushroom is called Amanita filloides, and Amanita is the name of the family.

And there's many different amanitas out there, but Amnita feloides is the most deadly one out there.

And what they do is now they try to give mushrooms common names, So instead of using the Latin name amnit to feloides, it's called the death cap, which is much more rememberable, and it helps you associate the mushroom of a common name.

And yeah, it helps also spread the word that is dangerous.

So you've got the deaf cap mushroom, which is a good name for it, a great name for it.

Then you've got a.

Mushroom called the funeral bell, one which called angel wings gives you wings to fly up to heaven hopefully not.

So the death cap, that's the one that you reckon, is what the most deadly and the most prevalent.

Yeah, definitely the most deadly.

It shuts down your liver and kidneys.

It's also really quite a common mushroom and prevalent.

And another interesting thing is that it originated in Europe.

But the spores of mushrooms, which is the way they release flowers, their seeds, it's called spores, and they released thousands even millions of them from from the underside of their cap, and they float across everywhere and they have now self seeded in other continents.

So I think it's in Asia now Africa, where there was originally a European.

Species and vice versa.

Now we're getting other mushrooms which were from other continents in our country, in our continent, so it's quite interesting.

So there will be new dangers if you're not used.

You've never seen a death cap, for example, in Asia before because they haven't existed in the last five years they have, so there would be more mistakes of people potentially picking that incorrectly because they've not seen it before or stuff like that.

Yeah, right, and they have them in Russia as well.

Yeah, yeah, very much.

Yeah, Russia's, like you mentioned, it's one of the top mushroom foraging countries in the world.

And it's a huge almost like national sport.

And yeah, the deaf mushroom is very prevalent in Russia.

So maybe Melnikov really did accidentally pick the wrong mushroom, consume it, and later die from the poison.

Perhaps the timing is all just a coincidence.

Maybe I'm still not convinced of.

Melnikov was a head scientist of a department that was responsible for the development of the thrusters on Luna twenty five.

It's exactly the thrusters that failed, causing Lunar twenty five to crash.

If you were a petty, vindictive but powerful dictator.

He wanted to blame someone for the failed mission.

Melnikov would be pretty high up on your list.

Something else that bothers me about this is the amount of time that Melnikov was in hospital.

He was quietly admitted on August eleventh, but his death was made public three weeks later on August first.

So either it took Melnikov, a seventy seven year old man, three weeks to die from poison mushrooms that usually kill in days, or they kept his death hidden for around two weeks.

Both of these possibilities are quite unusual when you consider the wider context of the space mission in Melnikov's role in it.

There is also another theory.

Perhaps Melnikov wasn't poisoned by mushrooms at all.

Maybe he was poisoned by something else and they're using the mushrooms as a cover up.

It would not be the first time that the Russian government is involved in poisoning.

Melnikov was part of a scientific team that continued to work with international colleagues after the Ukraine invasion.

As the West turned its back on Russia, Russians were expected to turn their back on the West, and.

Then the.

Story lawyer, but not Melnikov.

He just shrugged it off and kept working to advance a collective understanding of science.

That's what he was all about.

After all, it wasn't him who invaded Ukraine.

Melnikov had been working with the US and Japan specifically for years.

The Kremlin's propaganda clearly hadn't worked on him.

There's no doubt Pun's people would have had an iron him because of this.

Is it possible the Lunar twenty five crash was the final straw, and the FSB got given the go ahead to get rid of him.

One last thing that's worth.

In twenty eighteen, Melnikov was working for the Central Research Institute of Machine Building, Scientific Russian Rocket and Space Travel Center.

It's one of the main analytical centers of the State Space Corporation ross Cosmos.

On July twentieth, twenty eighteen, the FSB conducted extensive searches at ross Cosmos, sort of Kremlin henchman raid on the space center.

This is due to a accusation the researchers there had been quote sharing secret information with Western colleagues regarding the construction of hypersonic technology, basically spying in the eyes of the Kremlin.

The Central Research Institute could argue though, that this was just part of their international cooperation with the West.

Either way, an employee was arrested on spying charges for quote handing over closed information about the technologies used in the development of hypersonic aircraft to a NATO country.

This alleged spy was seventy three years old.

Is it possible that Melnikov too was secretly accused of spying?

He worked at the same place, was a similar age, and continued to cooperate on scientific research with the West for his sake.

I hope he wasn't accused of this, and I hope the poisoning was just an accident.

By all accounts, Vitali Melnikov was not a bad man.

He just wanted to explore space with the rest of the world's scientists.

He was a big fan of advancement through cooperation.

Since twenty seventeen, he was even a professor at the People's Ship University of Russia, which focuses on providing education to foreign students in the country.

It's one of Russia's top universities.

Notably, the anti Kremlin dissident politician Alexi Navalni studied there.

Graduating with a law degree in nineteen ninety eight.

He died in twenty twenty four in a Siberian penal colony.

Melnikov was honored to teach at the university, although if you were looking at their records alone you wouldn't know it.

For some reason, the university has completely removed vitally Melnikov's name from their alumni.

He's been erased.

They did the same with Navalni.

Make of that what you will.

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 Jutefu.

Sound mixed by Splicing Block.

See my other projects at Hanrahan dot t V.

Get me on social media at Jake under School Hanrahan.

That's h I n R A h I n H m

Hm