First they killed his friend. Then they killed him.

According to Indian media reports, Antov died after he fell from a third-floor window at his hotel on Sunday.

His death comes just days after another Russian he was traveling with was also found dead. His travel companion, Vladimir Budanov, reportedly died at the same hotel on Friday.

Police Superintendent Vivekanand Sharma said that Budanov suffered a stroke and that Antov “was depressed after [his friend’s] death” and died by suicide.

If you didn’t know Indian police were easily corrupted by Russian bribes, now you do.

The BBC reported that Antov had criticized the Russian missile strikes in Ukraine last June on WhatsApp, saying that “it’s extremely difficult to call all this anything but terror.”

He later said the message was a result of a “technical error.”

Antov, who was featured on Forbes’s list of the richest Russian lawmakers in 2019, is the latest in a slew of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s critics to die under mysterious circumstances.

It’s really not that mysterious. Criticize Elon Musk, lose your freedom of speech. Criticize Putin, lose your life.

“We can almost certainly rule out the official explanation of the deaths as suicides or poor health,” University of South Carolina international business professor Stanislav Markus recently told Vox of the deaths…

• Dmitry Zelenov fell down a flight of stairs
• Viktor Cherkesov fell into severe illness
• Alexander Buzakov died from “no causes”
• Ravil Maganov fell from a sixth-floor hospital window
• Anatoly Gerashchenko fell “from a great height” at the Moscow Aviation Institute
• Leonid Shulman fell from despair
• Alexander Tyulakov died from no causes

CNN counted at least twelve recent assassinations, hinting that Putin treats criticism of the Ukraine war as a simple litmus to murder powerful/wealthy independent thinkers.

This comes after three separate healthcare workers in 2020 who criticized how COVID-19 was managed… suddenly fell out of windows.

And that was after a 2018 journalist investigating mercenaries in Syria fell out of his window.

Death by window goes back quite a ways…

• By 2007 at least 14 journalists “died under questionable circumstances” including Ivan Safronov and Dmitry Kholodov
• 2009: Russian journalist falls to death after revealing forged signatures

In related news, the newly appointed head of security at Twitter (whose resume magically added copious past risk management experience after taking the new job) abruptly lost her voice December 20th.

Her silence allegedly is because the Twitter CEO started targeting her with censorship tactics, after physically threatening her predecessor.

Update December 29:

The deaths of two Russian leaders in charge of producing weapons are being treated as related.

Alexander Buzakov, former general, suddenly passed away on December 24. Alexei Maslov, former Russian army commander and tank chief, suddenly passed away the next day (shortly after Putin cancelled a meeting with him).

Neither had any prior health issues.