A senior Russian official involved in planning the Ukraine war died on Wednesday after plunging 160 feet from a window on the 16th floor of a high-rise apartment building.
Marina Yankina, 58, was found dead by a pedestrian walking by the building on St. Petersburg’s Zamshina Street, according to Russian news outlet Mash’s Telegram channel.
Yankina’s personal effects and a cache of documents were discovered on a balcony on the 16th floor of the building.
Investigators said their initial finding was that she committed suicide.
The report alleged that right before jumping to her death, Yankina spoke to her ex-husband, informing him she was about to kill herself. She also asked him to call the police to the building where she lived.
Yankina had run the the financial support department of the Ministry of Defense for the Western Military District, which was part of the invasion of Ukraine.
The war official’s death is being looked into by the Russian Investigative Committee, Mash reported.
Yankina is the latest suspicious death among high ranking Russian officials and influential business figures since the start of the Ukraine war. She is also not the first person involved in the war to fatally fall out of a window.
Pavel Antov, a Russian sausage tycoon and critic of the Ukraine war, died in late December 2022 after reportedly falling from a window at a hotel in India.
His death came only days after his friend died on the same trip, according to BBC News.
A month earlier, Colonel Vadim Boiko, 44, who had a lead role in the Russian military’s mobilization into Ukraine, allegedly committed suicide by shooting himself five times in the chest inside his commander’s office. He had been blamed for many of the setbacks in the war, his widow said.