Russian Minister Dies by Suicide Hours After Dismissal by President Putin

Russia’s transport minister was found dead from a gunshot wound, the Russian authorities said on Monday, hours after the Kremlin announced he had been relieved of his duties.

Law enforcement authorities said they were investigating the death as a possible suicide.

The minister, Roman V. Starovoyt, 53, served as governor of the Kursk region for nearly six years before being appointed to the transport post in May 2024. Three months after his promotion, Ukraine forces crossed into the region and seized territory that its military held until earlier this year.

The monthslong occupation of Kursk was the first invasion of Russian territory since World War II and a major embarrassment to President Vladimir V. Putin. It set off domestic recriminations that in recent months have gathered steam.

The Russian authorities have arrested former officials from Kursk and accused them of embezzling more than $12 million in funds that Moscow had earmarked to fortify the border with Ukraine during Mr. Starovoyt’s tenure as governor.

In April, Mr. Starovoyt’s successor and longtime deputy, Aleksei B. Smirnov, was arrested and accused of embezzlement as part of the case. Mr. Smirnov was the acting governor of Kursk at the time of the Ukrainian invasion.

The Russian state news agency, Tass, citing Russian law enforcement, reported on Monday that more people may be charged soon because one of the defendants has begun to “actively testify” against others.

The events have rattled the Moscow elite and spurred speculation about the reasons behind them.

On Monday morning, the Kremlin posted a decree signed by Mr. Putin that relieved Mr. Starovoyt of his duties as transport minister. Within hours, the Russian leader was shown in the Kremlin meeting with Mr. Starovoyt’s replacement, Andrei S. Nikitin, the former governor of the Novgorod region.

On a call with reporters, Dmitri S. Peskov, the spokesman for the Kremlin, declined to explain why Mr. Starovoyt had been removed. “I don’t have anything here to add,” Mr. Peskov said. “It is a decision of the head of state.”

The news followed a weekend of travel disruption, when hundreds of flights were grounded at Russian airports as Ukraine launched drone attacks.
But Ekaterina Schulmann, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, had pointed to the embezzlement case in Kursk, writing on social media that Mr. Starovoyt could be imprisoned.

Russian news agencies later reported that Mr. Starovoyt was dead.

Svetlana Petrenko, the spokeswoman for Russia’s Investigative Committee, a federal law enforcement body, issued a statement saying that Mr. Starovoyt’s body had been found in his car in Odintsovo, an affluent area outside Moscow. The authorities, she said, “are working on the scene to establish the circumstances of the incident.”

Mr. Petrenko said, “The main working theory is suicide.”

But Moscow 24, a state-run television channel, reported that Mr. Starovoyt had died in a wooded area in Odintsovo near a parking lot where he had left his Tesla. The channel showed footage of emergency workers carrying a body bag out of the bushes on a stretcher.

The Kremlin did not comment on Mr. Starovoyt’s death.

The Russian Ministry of Transport published an obituary on its website, saying Mr. Starovoyt’s “professional knowledge and experience were highly valued by his colleagues and industry workers.”

Since Mr. Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, failures on the battlefield have at times been followed by demonstrative action against Russian officials.

The defense minister at the time of the invasion, Sergei K. Shoigu, was removed from his post after pro-Russian commentators and other analysts partly blamed him for the Russian military’s failures in the early stages of the assault.

And a number of top Russian defense ministry officials have been imprisoned on corruption charges.