Russian General Who Knew Secrets Of Putin's Palace Dies In Prison

The Russian general who oversaw the building of Vladimir Putin’s luxurious Black Sea palace and knew all of its secrets has died suddenly in prison.

Photo Insert: Lopyrev was a lieutenant-general in the Federal Protection Service (FSO), the 50,000-strong military unit controlled by the Presidential Administration that is tasked with guarding Putin.

Gennady Lopyrev, 69, had been due for parole but was reportedly diagnosed with leukemia on Aug 14 and died two days later, James Kilner reported for The Telegraph.

News agencies reported that he hadn’t previously complained of feeling ill but a Russian prisons watchdog official insisted that Lopyrev had died of natural causes. “There was no crime,” said Viktor Boborykin of Russia’s Public Monitoring Commission.

Lopyrev was imprisoned in the IK-3 prison colony in the Ryazan region in central Russia for 10 years in 2017 for taking bribes in exchange for lucrative building contracts.

IK-3 is a tough prison targeted by the Kremlin’s Wagner mercenary group for convict recruits to fight in Ukraine.

Lopyrev was a lieutenant-general in the Federal Protection Service (FSO), the 50,000-strong military unit controlled by the Presidential Administration that is tasked with guarding Putin.

As the FSO commander in the North Caucasus, one of Lopyrev’s main projects was to oversee the construction and security of Putin’s palace at Gelendzhik near Sochi on Russia’s Black Sea coast.

Construction began in 2005 and cost an estimated £780 million. It is built in a mock Italian Renaissance fashion and is hidden away in forests next to a cliff that falls away to a sandy private beach.

Corruption is rife in Russia’s armed forces but it is unusual for high-ranking generals to be charged and sent to prison for bribe-taking unless they have fallen out of favor. In 2016, when Lopyrev was arrested, media reports said he had stubbornly denied the charges and claimed that he had been set up by other senior officers.

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