Pavel Antov, a Russian businessman who made a lot of money selling sausages, was found dead in an Indian hotel two days after a friend who was on the same trip died.
They were in Odisha, an eastern state, and the politician millionaire had just celebrated his birthday at the hotel.
In the city of Vladimir, east of Moscow, Antov was a well-known person.
After a message showed up on his Whatsapp account last summer, he said he hadn’t criticized Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The millionaire’s death is the latest in a string of mysterious deaths of Russian tycoons that have happened since the Russian invasion began. Many of these people have been vocal critics of the war.
Russian media said that Mr. Antov, who was 65 years old, fell out of a hotel window in the city of Rayagada on Sunday. Vladimir Budanov, one of the four Russians in his group, died at the hotel on Friday.
Superintendent Vivekananda Sharma of the Odisha Police said that Mr. Budanov had a stroke and that his friend “was sad after his death and also died.” Alexei Idamkin, the Russian consul in Kolkata, told the Tass news agency that police did not see “anything criminal in these tragic events.”
Jitendra Singh, a tour guide, told reporters that Mr. Budanov may have “drank a lot of alcohol because he had liquor bottles.”
Pavel Antov started the Vladimir Standard Meat Processing Plant. In 2019, Forbes put his wealth at about $140 million (£118 million), which put him at the top of Russia’s rich list of politicians and government workers.
He was very important at the Legislative Assembly in Vladimir, where he was in charge of a committee on agriculture and the environment. Vyacheslav Kartukhin, who was the vice chairman of the Assembly, said that he had died in “tragic circumstances.”
Late last June, he seemed to react to a Russian missile attack on a residential block in the Shevchenko’s district of Kyiv, which killed a man and hurt his 7-year-old daughter and her mother.
A WhatsApp message on Antov’s account explained how the family was dug out of the rubble: “It’s very hard to call all this anything but terror.”
The message was deleted, and Antov then wrote on social media that he liked the president, was a “patriot of my country,” and supported the war.
The WhatsApp message came from someone whose opinion he strongly disagreed with about the “Special Military Operation in Ukraine,” he insisted. It was posted by mistake on his Messenger, and he said it was a very annoying misunderstanding.
Since the war started, a number of well-known Russian businessmen have died in strange ways.
Ravil Maganov, who was the head of Russia’s oil giant Lukoil, fell out of a hospital window in Moscow in September.
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