In December 2024, almost exactly seven months before Russia’s transport minister was found dead from a gunshot wound, lying in the bushes near his Tesla in a Moscow suburb, investigators in Kursk announced the arrest of a former executive with a border region’s development corporation.
Igor Grabin, authorities alleged, misspent budget funds that had been earmarked -- around 19 billion rubles ($250 million) -- for defenses along Kursk’s winding border with Ukraine.
Those fortifications included meter-high concrete pyramids known as “dragon’s teeth,” designed to thwart tanks and protect Kursk from invasion. Ukrainian forces invaded Kursk anyway on August 6, 2024, embarrassing the Kremlin; the dragon’s teeth reportedly eroded from rain and snow.
In the months that followed Grabin’s arrest, other executives, including his boss, were detained, implicated in the embezzlement, allegedly receiving kickbacks from subcontractors. Kursk’s governor, Aleksei Smirnov, resigned in December 2024. He was arrested four months later.
Smirnov, however, was not governor at the time the alleged embezzlement took place. That was Roman Starovoit, who was promoted to be Russia’s transport minister in May 2024.
Starovoit was fired by President Vladimir Putin on July 7. His body was found hours later. Investigators say suicide is the leading explanation.
In Putin’s Russia, theft or embezzlement of public funds is neither a new phenomenon nor a rare one. In fact, corruption has only worsened during Putin’s more than 25 years as the country’s preeminent leader, experts said.
But the murk surrounding Starovoit’s death has captured the attention of Russia’s political elites. For many, it’s not a settled fact that he killed himself. Nor is it certain he was even alive at the time of his sacking by Putin.
It’s also the latest in a series of untimely deaths involving prominent public or private sector officials. More than eight energy company executives have died under questionable circumstances since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
What it reflects, said Ilia Shumanov, former executive director for Transparency International Russia, is how the Ukraine war has scrambled Russia’s ruling classes -– politicians, security agencies, military officials, oligarchs.
“The date of (Starovoit’s) death, and the time of death, we don’t know. Before Putin’s signature? Before the signing of this firing decree?” he said in an interview. “There are too many questions regarding all this.”
“There are signs of a transformation of the elite system since the start of the war.…Now we are seeing different clans. Different groups are trying to play their games, and they are not coordinating between each other because this is a survival strategy for them," he said.
Aleksandra Prokopenko, a former Russia Central Bank adviser, said the circumstances surrounding Starovoit's death "once again highlight how opaque the senior echelons of Russian government have become at functioning in crisis situations.”
“No one knows anything, and no one wants to take responsibility,” Prokopenko, now an expert at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said in an analysis.
‘School of Governors’
Questions about the Kursk region’s defense preparedness, in particular about the “dragon’s teeth,” appeared in local news reports as far back as late 2023.
In May 2024, Starovoit, who had served as Kursk’s governor since 2019, was elevated to join Putin’s cabinet. It was seen as a recognition of his competence as a technocrat on a local level.
As transport minister, Starovoit oversaw a massive federal bureaucracy regulating everything from highways to railways.
That oversight dovetailed with Starovoit’s yearslong ties to billionaire Arkady Rotenberg, a childhood friend of Putin.
Rotenberg and his brother’s wealth stem from the construction company that has earned massively lucrative building projects, including during the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
Starovoit oversaw the Rotenberg project that built the Kerch Bridge, a hugely expensive trophy effort linking the Russian-occupied Crimea Peninsula to the Russian mainland. Ukraine has tried multiple times to damage or destroy the bridge.
In Russian culture -- business, government, or criminal -- that arrangement is known as a “roof” -- essentially a person or entity that protects or looks out for someone else.
Three months after Starovoit moved to Moscow, Ukrainian troops invaded Kursk, apparently with little hindrance.
The results were mixed. It failed to draw Russian forces away from elsewhere along the front line where Ukrainian troops were under pressure. But it demonstrated Ukrainian pluck.
And it embarrassed the Kremlin: it was the first time foreign troops had attacked and occupied Russian territory since World War II. The military ultimately enlisted around 11,000 North Korean troops and spent seven months pushing Ukrainian troops out.
On December 9, 2024, Grabin, who previously was the deputy director general of the public Kursk Region Development Corporation, was arrested.
Eleven days later, his boss Vladimir Lukin was arrested. Both were charged with embezzlement.
Smirnov, who had been Starovoit’s deputy before taking over, was detained in April 2025. According to the Kommersant newspaper and the Telegram channel 112, he had given testimony implicating Starovoit.
In all, nine people have been detained or implicated in the scandal in Kursk.
Timing Is Everything
On July 7, at 9:20 a.m. Moscow time, the Kremlin announced that Starovoit was being removed as transport minister.
Just before 4 p.m., Telegram channels known for their links to Russian security agencies reported that Starovoit had been found dead, and that he had appeared to have killed himself.
Around 4:20 p.m., the national Investigative Committee confirmed Starovoit’s death, saying he had been found in his personal car -- a Tesla -- in a parking lot in the Moscow suburb of Odintsovo. “The primary version is suicide.”
In the hours after, however, there were conflicting reports about where his body had been found -- in the car or in the bushes adjacent to the parking lot. Further confusing matters were reports that Starovoit had possibly died a day earlier.
Forbes Russia said Starovoit may have died sometime during the night of July 5. A prominent lawmaker said he had “died some time ago.”
If true, that would present a problem for the Kremlin: did Putin know Starovoit was dead at the time that the decree firing him was signed and released?
Sergey Markov, a Kremlin friendly political analyst, suggested that he was murdered to stop him from testifying against other officials.
Who Benefits?
For many Russians, there’s a widespread belief that corruption has worsened under Putin, a vein of discontent that the late anti-corruption crusader Aleksei Navalny tapped into.
There is also the widespread perception that graft is tolerated, particularly by Kremlin insiders and security agencies like the Federal Security Service unless the graft reflects badly on Putin. Or on national security.
That may be one factor in Starovoit’s death, Shumanov said.
“If you are the person responsible for the invasion of Ukrainian forces onto Mother Russia soil, you are much worse than Navalny,” he said. “We don’t even know the criminal case against him. It could be treason” instead of embezzlement.
“Who could be the beneficiary of his death?” he asked.
“What happened has no precedent in the history of modern Russia and clearly indicates that something inside the system has begun to work completely differently,” Tatyana Stanovaya, a prominent expert on Russian politics, said in a commentary.
