War between Ukraine and RussiafileIn an interview published on Tuesday, Igor Volobuev speaks about his exit in early March and the reasons that prompted him to come to Ukraine, as well as the wave of suicides among Russian oligarchs.
It’s a deviation that gets people talking about it. On March 2, Igor Volobuev, vice president of Gazprombank – the bank of Russian energy company Gazprom – decided to leave Russia. This departure, less than a week after Russian troops began invading Ukraine, could have indicated a flight. It’s obviously nothing. Volobuev actually went to Ukraine to fight with the Homeland Defense Volunteer Forces. In an interview with Russian investigative media The Insider and the Ukrainian League website published on Tuesday, he elaborated on the reasons for his departure. “I couldn’t be in Russia any longer. I have Ukrainian citizenship and I was born in Akhtyrka [à l’est de l’Ukraine, ndlr]I could no longer observe from the outside what Russia is doing to my homeland,” he explains.
Igor Volobuyev is not the first senior Russian leader to leave the country. In March, Andrey Panov, deputy general manager of Aeroflot, Russia’s national airline, defected and found refuge in Israel. The same story for Lev Khasis, a board member at Sberbank, a major Russian bank, who fled to the United States in April, The Moscow Times reports. Instances of defections or perceived opposition to the war in Ukraine are still rare among Russian leaders and oligarchs.
“A Staged Suicide”
In addition to his own fate, in this interview Volobuev also referred to the wave of suicides that has gripped the Russian oligarchs for several weeks. According to information from the American magazine Newsweek, published on April 22, six influential Russian businessmen, most of whom specialize in the energy sector, have been found dead in recent weeks, mostly in ambiguous and intriguing ways.
In this list of deaths we find other high-ranking gas company leaders such as Vladislav Avayev, former vice president of Gazprombank, who was found riddled with bullets next to his wife and daughter, or Sergey Protosenya, former general manager of the Russian gas giant Novatek. discovered hanged, again near the bodies of his wife and daughter.
“It’s a staged suicide. I think he was killed,” Volobuev said of Vladislav Avayev, his former colleague at the gas giant’s bank, whom he says he never knew personally. Before fleeing, he assures that he never felt in danger in Russia: “There was no danger to my life, I even had a very stable material situation.” He now lives in Kyiv and says he wants to make amends with Gazprombank for all those years. “I am ashamed [des crimes commis par l’armée russe en Ukraine]. I will regret it for the rest of my life. I want to wash away my Russian past.” Guns in hand? He is considering joining the Ukrainian armed forces.