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Speaker 1: On February twenty fourth, twenty twenty two, Russian forces crossed

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Speaker 1: over the border into Ukraine with heavy weapons and armored vehicles.

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Speaker 1: This was stage one of Putin's full scale invasion of Ukraine.

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Speaker 1: His plan was to quickly sweep across the country and

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Speaker 1: take the capital of Kiev. It didn't quite go like that,

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Speaker 1: though Ukrainians fought back. They formed volunteer militia forces, backed

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Speaker 1: top the military, and campaigned for better weapons from the West.

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Speaker 1: Three years into the war and Russia is still nowhere

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Speaker 1: near Kiev. Thousands have died on the battlefield and civilian

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Speaker 1: infrastructure is targeted every week, but still Ukraine is holding strong.

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Speaker 1: As is the case with any war, peculiar things began

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Speaker 1: to happen after the invasion. Anti Putin. Russian saboteurs got

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Speaker 1: to work inside Russia. The Kremlin sought to disrupt Europe

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Speaker 1: through criminal gangs and black market weapons dealing went into overdrive.

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Speaker 1: Something that caught my eye in particular, though, was a

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Speaker 1: little bit stranger than all of this. I noticed that

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Speaker 1: there was a verst number of Russian oligarchs who started

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Speaker 1: falling out of windows. If it was a windows, it

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Speaker 1: was some other clumsy or extremely violent death. So I

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Speaker 1: got in touch with my friend and colleague, Sergei Slipchenkov.

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Speaker 1: He's a Ukrainian journalist who speaks both Russian and English fluently.

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Speaker 1: We'd been on the ground at working in Kiev the

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Speaker 1: week of the invasion. He agreed, as to many other

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Speaker 1: journalists at the time, that this was really weird. Together,

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Speaker 1: we dug deeper into the deaths of these rich Russian

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Speaker 1: power brokers. What we found was an unprecedented number of accidents, suicides,

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Speaker 1: and violent murders, sending oligarchs to their grave. Now, we

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Speaker 1: don't particularly care if some Russian oligarch dies, but to

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Speaker 1: understand these weird kremlinink deaths is to proper understand Putin

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Speaker 1: and what he's up to. It was clear a pattern

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Speaker 1: was emerging and we wanted to document it, and so

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Speaker 1: sad Oligarch was born. Since we finished season one, the

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Speaker 1: millionaires and billionaires keep dropping like flies. So get ready

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Speaker 1: for sad Oligarch Season two, an investigative podcast that focuses

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Speaker 1: on the mysterious deaths of Russia's Kremlin linked power brokers.

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Speaker 1: Listen to sad Oligarch on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts,

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Speaker 1: or wherever you get your podcasts