As soon as the news of the discovery of the lifeless body of Mikhail Lesin had spread, everyone had thought about the long arm of the Russian secret services. Then the hypothesis of heart attack had made him think that really the causes of his death could be natural. Now the medical examiner reports wounds all over his body.
When only a few hours after the discovery of his corpse had passed, I wrote that the death of Lesin would not end in a hotel room in Washington. And so it was. On Thursday, Washington chief medical examiner released a report detailing blunt force injuries to Lesin’s neck, legs, arms, torso, and to his head. The latter is probably the one that killed him.
It suddenly vanishes the heart attack hypothesis that spread, immediately after his death, from his family and from the Russian media.
Meanwhile, Russian officials complained that they became aware of details only after the autopsy was released and demand explanations.
Police spokesman said that the case remains under investigation but. Let’s keep waiting to something new. In the meanwhile, a look at who was Mikhail Lesin, opens the way to many explanations.
Media Mogul
Lesin was not a small fish. He was Minister of the Press under Yeltsin and Putin and, until a few months ago, he headed Gazprom-Media, the holding company that controls the information in Russia.
Someone says he was behind the resistible rise of Vladimir to the presidency of the Federation, after Yeltsin. True or not, Lesin played a very important role in the creation of the war machine of Russian propaganda. The Orwellian giant that has been reporting for month a parallel reality on the war in Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea, the Malaysia MH17 downing and airstrikes in Syria, is largely his creature.
He was behind the birth of RT, the flagship of Russian disinformatsija in English. And he was always behind the clampdown on some media not aligned with the Kremlin, like the television channel NTV and the radio Echo Moskvy, jailing its owner when he was minister. In December 2014, however, he suddenly resigned from Gazprom-Media. He said it was due to family reasons, but according to Forbes Russia he was fired directly by Putin.
Hollywood
Although he had known in the US as an anti-liberal, he had escaped the Magnitsky list of persona non grata, and wasn’t touched by the sanctions on individuals for the war in Ukraine, that hit many people around him.
Indeed, he had recently moved with his whole family to California, where he loved to go shopping mansions worth $ 28 million. The passion for the media had not passed. From his home in Beverly Hills, through Qed International, he produced Hollywood movies like Fury, starring Brad Pitt, Sabotage, with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dirty Grandpa, with Robert De Niro.
Its activities had attracted the attention of Senator Robert Winker, who wrote to the Department of Justice asking for investigating for international corruption and money laundering.
In short, Lesin was a powerful man with powerful friends and a bunch of enemies. Honestly a bit little to have a reasonable doubt that it was murder.
The explanations of his death
The day after the medical report was released, his former friend and partner, Sergey Vasilev, has told the Russian paper Kommersant that Lesin was in disgrace in Washington, that he got drunk and probably fell and injured his neck, legs, arms, torso and fatally beat his head.
But back at the time of his death, another of his former partner, Alfred Koch, former Deputy Prime Minister of Russia in the 90’s, had launched the hypothesis that Lesin had become an FBI informant and that this is why he was killed. ” How could the Russian embassy have known the cause of death before the medical examiner?”, he wrote on Facebook referring to the hypothesis of a heart attack that was circulating. ” Maybe they were scared of Lesin talking to the FBI in exchange for ending the investigation against him?”
That’s why the death of Lesin is a mystery whatever, nor could it be otherwise.
@daniloeliatweet
As soon as the news of the discovery of the lifeless body of Mikhail Lesin had spread, everyone had thought about the long arm of the Russian secret services. Then the hypothesis of heart attack had made him think that really the causes of his death could be natural. Now the medical examiner reports wounds all over his body.
