Two top Russian colonels plunge from high windows with one killed and the other left fighting for life as spate of mysterious deaths involving Putin officials continues

A top Russian colonel has died after mysteriously plunging 50ft from a window, while another was seriously injured from a similar fall in the latest spate of suspicious deaths involving Kremlin officials.

Colonel Alexey Zubkov - an employee for the Russian Investigative Committee - is fighting for his life after he plummeted 40ft from a bathroom window, according to Telegram channel VChK-OGPU.

Miraculously, Col. Zubkov was 'conscious' after his fall and 'briskly answered questions' but was unable to explain the reasons for his plunge.

He is the head of the forensic investigations department specialising in the study of digital information, with access to detailed information about secret investigations.

Col. Zubkov's fall came soon after a Russian anti-monopoly service official Artur Pryakhin, 56, who had previously been a police colonel, was found dead after he fell from a fifth floor window in Petrozavodsk.

Authorities were reportedly looking into his death, but official media outlets rushed out reports that he died by 'suicide' before an investigation had concluded.

Pryakhin now joins a long string of unexplained deaths of leading Russian figures under mysterious circumstances.

In 2022, Ravil Maganov, chairman of Lukoil, Russia's second-largest oil company, died when he fell from a sixth floor window at Moscow's elite Central Clinical Hospital, also known as the Kremlin Clinic.

Colonel Alexey Zubkov - an employee for the Russian Investigative Committee - is fighting for his life after he plummeted 40ft from a bathroom window

Zubkov's fall comes shortly after leading Russian official Artur Pryakhin died after falling from a fifth floor window

Pryakhin now joins a long string of unexplained deaths of leading Russian figures under mysterious circumstances during Putin's rule

On the same morning, Putin - who had earlier decorated Maganov, 67, with a top honour - swept into the hospital to pay his final respects to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, who had died the same week.

In 2023, leading war official Marina Yankina, 58, head of the financial support department of the Russian Defence Ministry's Western Military District, was found dead after falling 160ft from a 16th-floor window in St. Petersburg.

The circumstances surrounding her death remain unclear.

Former oil company vice president Mikhail Rogachev also died after falling from his tenth-floor apartment in Moscow in October 2024.

He had been a senior executive at Yukos, an oil company dismembered by Putin and his cronies.

He was found at the entrance to his building by an employee of Russia 's SVR foreign intelligence agency and with injuries characteristic of a plunge, local media said.

Pryakhin died after falling from a fifth floor window

TV channels reported that he lived on the tenth floor and that it was a suicide, claiming he had cancer and left a note - but those reports were vehemently denied by his close friends and relatives.

Those close to Rogachev insisted there were no signs that he was suicidal and he was in a 'good mood' shortly before his death.

Rogachev had a long and successful career in some of post-Soviet Russia's leading companies.

In 2007, he became a deputy general director of Vladimir Potanin's Norilsk Nickel, with Potanin now Russia's wealthiest man who has also been sanctioned by Britain as part of Putin's 'inner circle'.