Tragedy in St. Petersburg, Russia where a Russian defense official who was responsible for the Western Military District — the same district where a series of brutal military setbacks have occurred — fell to her death from the balcony of her 16th-floor apartment.
Yankina may very well have committed suicide. As the war continues to go badly in Russia, more and more corruption on a galactic scale is being uncovered — especially when it comes to spending on the military. Perhaps she felt the walls closing in or, just as likely, someone else wanted to shut her up to keep from being pushed out of a window themselves.
Whatever the reason, she hasn’t been the first, and she won’t be the last Russian to take a bad step on a tall building.
Police found her body under the windows of a high-rise building on Zamshina Street in the Kalininsky district of St. Petersburg.
Fontanka reports that based on preliminary information, she lived in the building where she fell, and law enforcement agencies haven’t ruled out that she took her own life.
The press service of the Western Military District confirmed that the woman worked with the department.
Russian Telegram channel Mashand other Russian media outlets reported that documents and other items belonging to Yankina were discovered on the 16th floor of the building.
Just weeks after being fired by Putin, Russian Major General Vladimir Makarov, former deputy head of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation for Combating Extremism, took his own life — supposedly. And last year, the former head of the Moscow Aviation Institute, Anatoly Gerashchenko, died after falling down “several flights of stairs.”
Sausage tycoon Pavel Antov was found dead at a hotel in India on Christmas Day. He died after falling from a window at a hotel in the city of Rayagad. Russian media said Antov, 65, died only two days after one of the people he was traveling with, Vladimir Budanov, died after suffering an apparent stroke.
There was an old joke in Russia in the 1950s and ’60s about it being too dangerous to drive in Moscow given all the fatal car accidents involving enemies of whoever was in charge at the time. What made the joke funny was that there was never any traffic to speak of in Moscow or any other city in Russia.
No doubt there are jokes about how dangerous hotel balconies are these days in Russia.