Speaker 1: Media. Something strange is going on. Another member of the
Speaker 1: Russian elite has been found dead.
Speaker 2: Reports suggests that he fell out of a window poisoned
Speaker 2: with mushrooms.
Speaker 3: He died of heart failure, died.
Speaker 1: Of carbon monoxide poisoning. How comes you are they?
Speaker 3: Dozens of Russian oligarchs politically motivated millionaires have died in
Speaker 3: the space of three years, most of them in suspicious circumstances.
Speaker 3: Many have hidden links to the Kremlins. This is sad
Speaker 3: Oligach Season two, an ongoing investigation into these recently dead
Speaker 3: Russian power brokers. Sad Oligach is created by me jake
Speaker 3: Hanrahan and my Ukrainian colleague, Sergey Slipchenkok. This is a
Speaker 3: H eleven studio and Coolso Media production. August three, a
Speaker 3: rocket scientist by the name of Vitally Melnikov is laid
Speaker 3: in a Moscow hospital bed. He's trapped under a nest
Speaker 3: of medical tubes and wires that are keeping him alive.
Speaker 3: Seventy seven years old, Melnikov is hardly in the prime
Speaker 3: of his life. Death is imminent. At some point in
Speaker 3: the past four weeks, Melnikov managed to consume poison mushrooms.
Speaker 3: When your body digests deadly mushrooms. The poison spreads through
Speaker 3: your blood. Fast toxins head straight for the liver and
Speaker 3: the kidneys. They bind to enzymes in the cells the
Speaker 3: body needs to produce proteins. Once this happens, the cells
Speaker 3: shut down that protein synthesis. You start to die. Just
Speaker 3: twenty four hours after consuming the poison mushrooms, Melnikov began
Speaker 3: via throwing up. He was chronically unwell, profuse, sweating, intense
Speaker 3: stomach cramps, blood in the toilet. His body dehydrated first,
Speaker 3: blood pressure tanked, heart going like the Clappers, total dizziness
Speaker 3: and disorientation. The day later in his liver is being
Speaker 3: disintegrated by the toxins. He goes yellow jaundice, His kidneys fail,
Speaker 3: he gets nosebleeds that don't stop for ages. It's blood
Speaker 3: one clot now within a weak. Multiple organs begin to fail, lungs, liver,
Speaker 3: skin sepsis moves to the gut. The gut leaks caustic
Speaker 3: bacteria into the bloodstream and in and out cycle of
Speaker 3: toxins destroying the body. The liver tries to cleanse itself
Speaker 3: and recycle the poison, but instead it concentrates it and
Speaker 3: makes the damage, worse and worse. Despite the critical care
Speaker 3: Melnikov receives at the Moscow Intensive care unit, it's far
Speaker 3: too late. He's got brain swelling, internal bleeding, full organ shutdown.
Speaker 3: The rocket scientist slides off his mortal coil and enters
Speaker 3: the Cosmos for real dead. No, you might be wondering
Speaker 3: why Vitali Melnikov is in this series. It was not
Speaker 3: a billionaire Russian lobbyist or anything like that. As I've said,
Speaker 3: he worked in the rocket, energy and space exploration industry,
Speaker 3: not as a man behind a desk, caching dodgy checks
Speaker 3: or stealing from the coffers, but as an actual hands
Speaker 3: on scientist. Monokov's demise was, however, possibly one of the
Speaker 3: many sad Oligarch deaths, at least that's what we've come
Speaker 3: to believe. Remember, the sad Oligarch umbrella covers the many
Speaker 3: branches of what could well be a large scale Kremlin
Speaker 3: policy of assassinating its own people, possibly a real conspiracy
Speaker 3: with a Russian elite clears its house with blood. But still,
Speaker 3: why would someone in the darkest depths of the Russian
Speaker 3: deep state want to kill a rocket scientist. Well, considering
Speaker 3: the expertise that such a role requires. There could actually
Speaker 3: be many different reasons a man like Melnikov might end
Speaker 3: up in murky waters, advanced weapons systems, propulsion technology. Who
Speaker 3: knows what a rocket scientist ends up working on, Especially
Speaker 3: when the government is involved, The possibilities are endless. We
Speaker 3: think it might be connected to something much more obvious, though.
Speaker 3: Lunar twenty five Russia's first lunar probe mission in forty
Speaker 3: seven years. This moonlanding expedition failed spectacularly on August twentieth,
Speaker 3: twenty twenty three. A week later, Melnikov was dead.
Speaker 4: Three Russia's first moon mission in forty seven years has failed.
Speaker 4: The Lunar twenty five spacecraft spun out of control and
Speaker 4: crashed into the Moon after a problem preparing for pre
Speaker 4: landing orbit. Russia's state space corporation ross Cosmos, said it
Speaker 4: had lost contact with the craft. In a statement, it
Speaker 4: said quote the apparatus moved into an unpredictable orbit and
Speaker 4: ceased to exist as a result of a collision with
Speaker 4: the surface of the Moon. It added that a special
Speaker 4: into departmental commission had been formed to investigate the reasons
Speaker 4: behind the loss of Luna twenty five. Best the reasons
Speaker 4: behind the loss.
Speaker 5: Of the five.
Speaker 3: When Surgery and me looked into this, our first thought
Speaker 3: was that the two are possibly connected, Like, how serious
Speaker 3: was this crashing into the moon? This lunar twenty five,
Speaker 3: this big space mission, the first one in almost half
Speaker 3: a century for Russia and then it crashes? Can you
Speaker 3: kind of explain what actually happened?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So when I was looking into this, actually monetarily,
Speaker 5: like it's a a big of a loss, it was
Speaker 5: around one hundred and thirty million USD right for the
Speaker 5: whole project. I thought it would be a couple maybe
Speaker 5: even billion. I think the conversion is like twelve billion
Speaker 5: rubles by no means small, but it's also kind of
Speaker 5: on the smaller side of like the fans aerospace projects, right,
Speaker 5: the bigger thing is one hundred percent the kind of symbolism.
Speaker 5: So initially this project was started in the like nineteen nineties,
Speaker 5: they were already talking about it, like a design was
Speaker 5: chosen or at least they were kind of like looking
Speaker 5: at designs in like the nineteen nineties. By nineteen ninety
Speaker 5: eight they selected like I think, like the design that
Speaker 5: was going to go forward with, but it kind of
Speaker 5: died down in two thousands. I think they were just
Speaker 5: focusing on other stuff at that time, and it was
Speaker 5: kind of like in like limbo. It looks like it
Speaker 5: picked back up in twenty tens. Initially the project was
Speaker 5: actually called like Luna Globe, so like Globe Moon whatever.
Speaker 5: Basically it was a different name, right, It was kind
Speaker 5: of not associated with the Soviet program until it was
Speaker 5: changed to Luna twenty five, kind of having that continuity
Speaker 5: with the Soviet Union, even though the last the Luna
Speaker 5: twenty four, like the one before that, was actually launched
Speaker 5: in nineteen seventy six, right, so like the reason they're
Speaker 5: naming it twenty five is to have that connection to
Speaker 5: the Soviet Union. In Russia, they're very much you know,
Speaker 5: the whole nostalgia thing is like very capitalized on. Soviet
Speaker 5: Union was the good old times. It's when Russia was
Speaker 5: like on par with the United States, you know, the
Speaker 5: only kind of.
Speaker 3: Rival to the big bad US, right, like a spiritual
Speaker 3: successor project.
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly. The space race was like a really big thing.
Speaker 5: It still is. It's still a very much like point
Speaker 5: of pride. They'll love to point out that, oh, yeah,
Speaker 5: the US land and on the moon, but we did this,
Speaker 5: We send the first man, we sent the first like woman,
Speaker 5: we did this, we did that. It's still looked back
Speaker 5: on as like kind of like a great achievement, and
Speaker 5: they see it as like very you know, like Russia
Speaker 5: as a successor of the Soviet Union, So they kind
Speaker 5: of play on that. That's the whole reason it's Luna
Speaker 5: twenty five, Like it was renamed, you know, like it
Speaker 5: was initially a different thing, and they intentionally renamed it
Speaker 5: to Luna twenty five to have that connection. There's like
Speaker 5: a national pride, right Like, yeah, like the one hundred
Speaker 5: and thirty million is a lot, but I think more
Speaker 5: so it's more of like showing that Russia is still
Speaker 5: a big boy. They can send things into space, right'.
Speaker 5: That's kind of like a mark of a great nation
Speaker 5: as they see it.
Speaker 4: The mission has raised hopes in Moscow that Russia was
Speaker 4: returning to the big power moon race, but this failure
Speaker 4: has underscored the decline of Russia's space power since the
Speaker 4: glory days of Cold War competition.
Speaker 3: A Sergeimy was saying, without the full context, the theory
Speaker 3: that Melnikov was killed because of a failed moon landing
Speaker 3: might sound fetched, but if we look at the history
Speaker 3: of Russia and what the space race means to the
Speaker 3: country's hegemony. Things look a lot less conspiratorial. Let's go
Speaker 3: back to the beginning, the days of the Soviet Union,
Speaker 3: Red Army, boots on the ground, communist rule. Okay, now
Speaker 3: it's time for a quick adbreak. All right, enough for that.
Speaker 3: Now back to the shop mother Russia in the nineteen
Speaker 3: forties World War Two. Squalid goolags and a ruthless dictator.
Speaker 3: If you don't get snitched on by your neighbor and
Speaker 3: sent to the dungeons, you might stab to death for
Speaker 3: thought crimes. Welcome to the USSA socialist utopia, it is not.
Speaker 3: The war against Nazi Germany was drawing to an end.
Speaker 3: Soviet troops had taken Berlin, and Hitler blew his brains
Speaker 3: out of his head on April thirtieth, nineteen forty five.
Speaker 3: The Soviets copied the Americans, and they capped Nazi rocket
Speaker 3: engineers and set them to work for the state. This
Speaker 3: supercharged the ussa's long range missile programs and launched the
Speaker 3: next phase their plans to go into space. In nineteen
Speaker 3: fifty seven, the Soviet Union launched the first ever artificial
Speaker 3: satellite into orbit Sputnik one. It was an incredible feat
Speaker 3: of engineering that had the Yanks shaken in their boots.
Speaker 3: A month after Spotnik one came Spotnik two. This satellite
Speaker 3: went into space the same as the first, but they
Speaker 3: put a dog in it to test how the first
Speaker 3: living creature in orbit might fare. This was the famous
Speaker 3: Lika the dog. Laikas sadly died a horrible death just
Speaker 3: hours after launch, a malfunctioning thermal control mentally overheated. Shocking,
Speaker 3: I know, but fans of the USSA don't know how
Speaker 3: to treat dogs. But the sixties, the space race was
Speaker 3: in full swing. The Cold War was heating up, and
Speaker 3: the Americans were desperate to be the first superpower to
Speaker 3: dominate space travel that were lacking on. On April twelfth,
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty one, Russia sent the first human into orbit,
Speaker 3: Yuri Gagarin. This was a victory for the Soviets. The
Speaker 3: Americans were left sour faced, tinkering with their rockets and
Speaker 3: twiddling their thumbs. Now, a retrospective, watered down telling of
Speaker 3: history might sometimes say that everything was just healthy competition.
Speaker 3: It absolutely was not. The space race between the USSR
Speaker 3: and the United States of America became an emblem of
Speaker 3: the global power struggle between both. By the mid sixties,
Speaker 3: the Russians were still collecting stripes, launching the first human spacewalk,
Speaker 3: first shuttle soft landing, and the first multi person mission
Speaker 3: to the stars. Why the only way for the US
Speaker 3: to recover from these Soviet space achievements was to put
Speaker 3: a man on the Moon first, And sure enough, on
Speaker 3: July twentieth, nineteen sixty nine, they did just that. At
Speaker 3: US astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped onto the dusty earth of
Speaker 3: the Moon's surface and planted a big, fat American flag
Speaker 3: into the ground. At this moment, the USSR had officially
Speaker 3: lost the space race. After all of that, the capitalists
Speaker 3: beat them to it. It was a big embarrassment for
Speaker 3: then Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. At this time, a sixteen
Speaker 3: year old of Vladimir Putin would have watched his country
Speaker 3: lose on the TV. He'd have read about it in
Speaker 3: the papers, heard about it in the street. First forward
Speaker 3: to the collapse of the Soviet Union nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 3: By this time Putin was almost forty. He was working
Speaker 3: in some capacity in the Saint Petersburg political administration. Having
Speaker 3: recently got back from his KGB posting in East Germany
Speaker 3: with no funding, the Russian space program splinters. You will
Speaker 3: have remembered all of this very well. This goes towards
Speaker 3: explaining why Lunar twenty five was such a big deal.
Speaker 3: Putin has spent his life trying to build his idea
Speaker 3: of a great Russian empire. The old law of the
Speaker 3: cosmonaut space race is very much part of that. He
Speaker 3: needed Lunar twenty five to be spectacular, something new for
Speaker 3: the history books for Russian space exploration.
Speaker 5: And this mission was also supposed to be like a
Speaker 5: first It was supposed to be a first lander on
Speaker 5: the south pole of the Moon, not too into the whole,
Speaker 5: like a space exploration. But for my understanding, that was
Speaker 5: supposed to be a kind of a difficult feat. At
Speaker 5: least nobody tried it. Nobody's been able to do it.
Speaker 5: So that was kind of the idea. And this project,
Speaker 5: even though like you know, it started back come in
Speaker 5: twenty tens, it just kept being delayed. From my understanding,
Speaker 5: it was supposed to launch like at one point in
Speaker 5: twenty nineteen, it got delayed again at that point, like
Speaker 5: so they were working with other partners, like for example,
Speaker 5: Sweden pulled out. Sweden was supposed to give them like
Speaker 5: some attack, I think, like something to look through samples
Speaker 5: on the moon. They basically said, like you're taking too long.
Speaker 5: They went with someone else. At this point, the project
Speaker 5: is just kind of like keeps being delayed, keeps being
Speaker 5: delayed to the point where the war in Ukraine starts
Speaker 5: and essentially everybody kind of shuns Russia, right, everybody pulls out.
Speaker 5: Tensions are high with the West, and nobody wants to
Speaker 5: work with Russia. Which you know, they have their so
Speaker 5: use rockets and stuff, but a lot of the technology,
Speaker 5: a lot of the things that actually go into this tech,
Speaker 5: they're having a harder time sourcing.
Speaker 3: That's something that I thought was really interesting. If you're
Speaker 3: trying to work out, well, oh, why would Melnikov be
Speaker 3: maybe maybe why would it be maybe purposely poisoned? It's
Speaker 3: just a scientist is to do with this in the
Speaker 3: greater context of the Soviet Union, like you said, and
Speaker 3: the fact that due to the war, all the people
Speaker 3: that will working kind of as international a political thing
Speaker 3: on this just went no, fuck that we're not working
Speaker 3: with Russia because of what they're doing I almost feel
Speaker 3: like surely puting and his mentality or anybody's mentality in
Speaker 3: that situation would be like, Okay, fuck it, we can
Speaker 3: do it ourselves, will show them and the embarrassment of
Speaker 3: it going boom crashing into the surface. I think in
Speaker 3: that context it would have been a pretty big deal
Speaker 3: for the Kremlin.
Speaker 5: You're spot on. That's exactit. Rhetoric they had, like Piskov was,
Speaker 5: you know, talking about it. He's like, oh, we don't
Speaker 5: need the West, we can do this ourselves. Kind of
Speaker 5: again going back to the Soviet Union, like we did
Speaker 5: it back then, we could do it now, you know,
Speaker 5: kind of ignoring that Soviet Union was a collection of
Speaker 5: a bunch of nations. You know, they don't have all
Speaker 5: these resources that we're in other parts of the Soviet Union.
Speaker 5: But anyway, yeah, it was very much. It was very
Speaker 5: much in that light of this Russia is amazing. It
Speaker 5: can do everything by itself. It doesn't need anybody, It
Speaker 5: doesn't really like depend on anyone. Right. It was a
Speaker 5: lot of this calling back to the Soviet Union and
Speaker 5: kind of I guess you could even say, like a
Speaker 5: supremacist thing, like we're better than everyone. We don't need anyone,
Speaker 5: We can do this ourselves. So when this you know,
Speaker 5: big project again it was supposed to be at first
Speaker 5: it would have been another kind of achievement for Russian exploration,
Speaker 5: all of a sudden it's it goes wrong, it crashes,
Speaker 5: and not only does it crash, four days later, an
Speaker 5: Indian mission does the exact same thing, successfully making it
Speaker 5: the fourth country after China, Us and Russia to make
Speaker 5: a soft landing on the Moon, which is like, you know,
Speaker 5: a big technological achievement. But not only do they do
Speaker 5: it on the Moon, it's on the South Pole where
Speaker 5: Russia was hoping to do it, so they get that
Speaker 5: first instead, you know, So not only did they did
Speaker 5: Russia fail, but now some like a nation that they
Speaker 5: see as inferior has also not only just achieved it,
Speaker 5: but did it first, and they kind of took that
Speaker 5: first from them.
Speaker 3: That is a definitely relevant point. I mean, as horrible
Speaker 3: as that is, let's be there is no way on
Speaker 3: earth that the Kremlin has any respect for the Indian
Speaker 3: space mission. I dare say most countries don't. And they
Speaker 3: actually did it successfully and did a good job of it.
Speaker 3: That must have been a kind of salt in the
Speaker 3: wound moment right.
Speaker 5: One hundred percent. They see people from China, from India,
Speaker 5: like anywhere you know that isn't European as like kind
Speaker 5: of lesser. How deep it is entrenched into the country,
Speaker 5: and government is like, you can debate that, but it's
Speaker 5: definitely there. It's very much a supremacist right, like we're better,
Speaker 5: We're the better race nation.
Speaker 4: Whatever.
Speaker 3: So Russia's new space mission to the Moon's south pole
Speaker 3: smashed into the surface and broke to bits. Then India
Speaker 3: beat them to it just four days later. What disaster
Speaker 3: for Putin. Someone had to be held responsible. Okay, now
Speaker 3: it's time for a quick out break, all right, enough
Speaker 3: for that, now back to the shore. Looking into this
Speaker 3: case specifically has been difficult. Reporting on Vatally Melnikov's death
Speaker 3: from the Russian press was very surface level. Things were
Speaker 3: kept mostly quiet. The family aren't saying much, the hospital
Speaker 3: isn't speaking. It's all a bit weird, especially when you
Speaker 3: consider the alleged cause of death, toxic mushroom poisoning. The
Speaker 3: death by fungi element of this case is especially unusual.
Speaker 3: According to his family, Melnikov had been picking wild mushrooms
Speaker 3: his whole life. In the days before he was hospitalized,
Speaker 3: he'd been making a broth from what he'd foraged near
Speaker 3: his home in Moscow. Nothing unusual there. In Russia, picking
Speaker 3: mushrooms is simply part of the culture, especially for the
Speaker 3: older generation. Remember, Melnikov was seventy seven years old when
Speaker 3: he died. Seems unlikely to me that he'd accidentally pick
Speaker 3: a poison mushroom, boil it and eat it as an
Speaker 3: experienced micro file a mushroom forager. To be fair, though,
Speaker 3: I know absolutely nothing about mushroom picking and the whole
Speaker 3: tradition and culture surrounding it, so I spoke to someone
Speaker 3: who does, Tommy Fitzpatrick. Tommy is an expert on mushrooms.
Speaker 3: He's been involved in this his whole life and he
Speaker 3: knows which ones to pick and which ones not.
Speaker 2: To my mother's Polish and part of the Polish culture
Speaker 2: in quite a lot of Eastern Europe and Europe is to.
Speaker 1: Go foraging for mushrooms.
Speaker 2: And from as young as I can remember, I was
Speaker 2: giving a little pen knife and will go out in
Speaker 2: the forest every time we visited our family in Poland
Speaker 2: and mushrooms, so I learnt from an early age, and
Speaker 2: all of the mushrooms I was taught by my family.
Speaker 2: I now know them plus much much more. I've actually
Speaker 2: gone advanced and got obsessed with it, and no more
Speaker 2: than everyone who taught me about mushrooms. So now they
Speaker 2: come to me for some mushroom micology knowledge.
Speaker 3: So if you were walking through the forest, are you
Speaker 3: pretty confident you'd be able to identify pretty much any
Speaker 3: mushroom you'd see just by sight.
Speaker 2: I wouldn't know all of them, but I know all
Speaker 2: the dangerous ones and all the best edibles. That's how
Speaker 2: you want to tackle foraging mushrooms. You need to know
Speaker 2: the most dangerous ones so you can avoid them, and
Speaker 2: then focus on the best edible ones. The ones in
Speaker 2: between are the ones not worth bothering with. But obviously,
Speaker 2: the more times you see some mushrooms that aren't edible
Speaker 2: or aren't even poisonous, you familiarize yourself with them, and
Speaker 2: then you might look them up in the book and
Speaker 2: find out what they are. But focus on the deadly
Speaker 2: ones to avoid them, and then the best edibles.
Speaker 3: That's what I'm really interested, obviously, because this Worstian scientist
Speaker 3: in his seventies ended up dying eating a poison mushroom.
Speaker 3: Now you said yourself. This is something that you grew
Speaker 3: up doing. It's part of the culture in Poland. I know,
Speaker 3: it's definitely part of the culture in Russia as well.
Speaker 3: How likely is it do you think that someone would
Speaker 3: be picking mushrooms as part of their culture, especially in
Speaker 3: old age. They've been doing it their whole life. They
Speaker 3: suddenly pick a poison one by accident. Is that something
Speaker 3: that happens often or is it rare?
Speaker 1: Would you say it will happen.
Speaker 2: People do die every year and it would be from
Speaker 2: accidentally picking the incorrect mushroom. You have field mushrooms which
Speaker 2: are all edible, apart from one which looks exactly the
Speaker 2: same as the edible ones, but it's called the yellow stainer.
Speaker 2: So the way you will test it is you'll cut
Speaker 2: this white mushroom in half or any way you like,
Speaker 2: and it will stain yellow, and if it doesn't, then
Speaker 2: you know you've got an edible mushroom. Also, it's got
Speaker 2: a bad smell compared to the other edible button mushrooms
Speaker 2: or field mushrooms. But yeah, it's quite interesting you talk
Speaker 2: about Russia because a lot of the mushrooms which you
Speaker 2: wouldn't bother with, or they have toxins in so you
Speaker 2: wouldn't pick them. For example, the Russians sometimes will pick
Speaker 2: them and they'll boil the mushroom to take out the
Speaker 2: toxins and then make it palatable and edible.
Speaker 1: But for me, you know that's going a bit far.
Speaker 2: You just again, I just focus on the best edibles,
Speaker 2: not making things edible. And then in terms of the
Speaker 2: most deadly mushroom in the world is the deaf cap
Speaker 2: mushroom and I believe that's probably what the Russian guy
Speaker 2: you're talking about would have been targetable.
Speaker 3: How many deadly poison mushrooms are there? Is there loads
Speaker 3: out there? You have to be careful or is it now?
Speaker 3: And then like what are the levels to it because
Speaker 3: I don't know anything about it.
Speaker 2: Well, in the UK there's probably five deadly mushrooms and
Speaker 2: then lots that will make you sick. In science, everything
Speaker 2: has a Latin name, So for example, the deaf cat
Speaker 2: mushroom is called Amanita filloides, and Amanita is the name
Speaker 2: of the family. And there's many different amanitas out there,
Speaker 2: but Amnita feloides is the most deadly one out there.
Speaker 2: And what they do is now they try to give
Speaker 2: mushrooms common names, So instead of using the Latin name
Speaker 2: amnit to feloides, it's called the death cap, which is
Speaker 2: much more rememberable, and it helps you associate the mushroom
Speaker 2: of a common name. And yeah, it helps also spread
Speaker 2: the word that is dangerous. So you've got the deaf
Speaker 2: cap mushroom, which is a good name for it, a
Speaker 2: great name for it.
Speaker 1: Then you've got a.
Speaker 2: Mushroom called the funeral bell, one which called angel wings
Speaker 2: gives you wings to fly up to heaven hopefully not.
Speaker 3: So the death cap, that's the one that you reckon,
Speaker 3: is what the most deadly and the most prevalent.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely the most deadly. It shuts down your liver
Speaker 2: and kidneys. It's also really quite a common mushroom and prevalent.
Speaker 2: And another interesting thing is that it originated in Europe.
Speaker 2: But the spores of mushrooms, which is the way they
Speaker 2: release flowers, their seeds, it's called spores, and they released
Speaker 2: thousands even millions of them from from the underside of
Speaker 2: their cap, and they float across everywhere and they have
Speaker 2: now self seeded in other continents. So I think it's
Speaker 2: in Asia now Africa, where there was originally a European.
Speaker 1: Species and vice versa.
Speaker 2: Now we're getting other mushrooms which were from other continents
Speaker 2: in our country, in our continent, so it's quite interesting.
Speaker 1: So there will be new dangers if you're not used.
Speaker 2: You've never seen a death cap, for example, in Asia
Speaker 2: before because they haven't existed in the last five years
Speaker 2: they have, so there would be more mistakes of people
Speaker 2: potentially picking that incorrectly because they've not seen it before
Speaker 2: or stuff like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, and they have them in Russia as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, very much.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Russia's, like you mentioned, it's one of the top
Speaker 2: mushroom foraging countries in the world.
Speaker 1: And it's a huge almost like national sport.
Speaker 2: And yeah, the deaf mushroom is very prevalent in Russia.
Speaker 3: So maybe Melnikov really did accidentally pick the wrong mushroom,
Speaker 3: consume it, and later die from the poison. Perhaps the
Speaker 3: timing is all just a coincidence. Maybe I'm still not
Speaker 3: convinced of. Melnikov was a head scientist of a department
Speaker 3: that was responsible for the development of the thrusters on
Speaker 3: Luna twenty five. It's exactly the thrusters that failed, causing
Speaker 3: Lunar twenty five to crash. If you were a petty,
Speaker 3: vindictive but powerful dictator. He wanted to blame someone for
Speaker 3: the failed mission. Melnikov would be pretty high up on
Speaker 3: your list. Something else that bothers me about this is
Speaker 3: the amount of time that Melnikov was in hospital. He
Speaker 3: was quietly admitted on August eleventh, but his death was
Speaker 3: made public three weeks later on August first. So either
Speaker 3: it took Melnikov, a seventy seven year old man, three
Speaker 3: weeks to die from poison mushrooms that usually kill in days,
Speaker 3: or they kept his death hidden for around two weeks.
Speaker 3: Both of these possibilities are quite unusual when you consider
Speaker 3: the wider context of the space mission in Melnikov's role
Speaker 3: in it. There is also another theory. Perhaps Melnikov wasn't
Speaker 3: poisoned by mushrooms at all. Maybe he was poisoned by
Speaker 3: something else and they're using the mushrooms as a cover up.
Speaker 3: It would not be the first time that the Russian
Speaker 3: government is involved in poisoning. Melnikov was part of a
Speaker 3: scientific team that continued to work with international colleagues after
Speaker 3: the Ukraine invasion. As the West turned its back on Russia,
Speaker 3: Russians were expected to turn their back on the West, and.
Speaker 1: Then the.
Speaker 3: Story lawyer, but not Melnikov. He just shrugged it off
Speaker 3: and kept working to advance a collective understanding of science.
Speaker 3: That's what he was all about. After all, it wasn't
Speaker 3: him who invaded Ukraine. Melnikov had been working with the
Speaker 3: US and Japan specifically for years. The Kremlin's propaganda clearly
Speaker 3: hadn't worked on him. There's no doubt Pun's people would
Speaker 3: have had an iron him because of this. Is it
Speaker 3: possible the Lunar twenty five crash was the final straw,
Speaker 3: and the FSB got given the go ahead to get
Speaker 3: rid of him. One last thing that's worth. In twenty eighteen,
Speaker 3: Melnikov was working for the Central Research Institute of Machine Building,
Speaker 3: Scientific Russian Rocket and Space Travel Center. It's one of
Speaker 3: the main analytical centers of the State Space Corporation ross Cosmos.
Speaker 3: On July twentieth, twenty eighteen, the FSB conducted extensive searches
Speaker 3: at ross Cosmos, sort of Kremlin henchman raid on the
Speaker 3: space center. This is due to a accusation the researchers
Speaker 3: there had been quote sharing secret information with Western colleagues
Speaker 3: regarding the construction of hypersonic technology, basically spying in the
Speaker 3: eyes of the Kremlin. The Central Research Institute could argue though,
Speaker 3: that this was just part of their international cooperation with
Speaker 3: the West. Either way, an employee was arrested on spying
Speaker 3: charges for quote handing over closed information about the technologies
Speaker 3: used in the development of hypersonic aircraft to a NATO country.
Speaker 3: This alleged spy was seventy three years old. Is it
Speaker 3: possible that Melnikov too was secretly accused of spying? He
Speaker 3: worked at the same place, was a similar age, and
Speaker 3: continued to cooperate on scientific research with the West for
Speaker 3: his sake. I hope he wasn't accused of this, and
Speaker 3: I hope the poisoning was just an accident. By all accounts,
Speaker 3: Vitali Melnikov was not a bad man. He just wanted
Speaker 3: to explore space with the rest of the world's scientists.
Speaker 3: He was a big fan of advancement through cooperation. Since
Speaker 3: twenty seventeen, he was even a professor at the People's
Speaker 3: Ship University of Russia, which focuses on providing education to
Speaker 3: foreign students in the country. It's one of Russia's top universities. Notably,
Speaker 3: the anti Kremlin dissident politician Alexi Navalni studied there. Graduating
Speaker 3: with a law degree in nineteen ninety eight. He died
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty four in a Siberian penal colony. Melnikov
Speaker 3: was honored to teach at the university, although if you
Speaker 3: were looking at their records alone you wouldn't know it.
Speaker 3: For some reason, the university has completely removed vitally Melnikov's
Speaker 3: name from their alumni. He's been erased. They did the
Speaker 3: same with Navalni. Make of that what you will. You've
Speaker 3: been listening to sad Oliga season two, produced by H
Speaker 3: eleven Studios for Cool Zone Media. Writing, editing, producing, concept
Speaker 3: and recording by myself, Jake Hanrahan, Research and reporting by
Speaker 3: Sergei Slipchenko, Me and Victim Mihail. Executive producing by Sophie Lichtman.
Speaker 3: Music by Sam Black, artwork by George Jutefu. Sound mixed
Speaker 3: by Splicing Block. See my other projects at Hanrahan dot
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Speaker 3: School Hanrahan.
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