A Russian singer accused of donating to the Ukraine army and calling President Vladimir Putin an “idiot” fell to his death from a window this week — just moments after authorities raided his apartment.
Vadim Stroykin, 58, plunged to his death from the 10th floor of his St. Petersburg apartment building on Wednesday after cops came to interrogate him about the alleged donations and other claims of extremism, local news outlet Fontanka reported.
Authorities said the British-educated musician and radio host was last seen alive when he went to his kitchen to get water during the police search, according to the outlet.
Local officials said they are still probing his death.
Stroykin, a staunch critic of Putin and the Ukraine war, was potentially facing 20 years in prison if convicted of funneling donations to the Ukrainian military.
The anti-war advocate had repeatedly bashed Putin and the Kremlin on social media.
“This idiot [Putin] declared war on his own people as well as a brother nation,” he wrote in a 2022 post on the VKontakte social media platform.
“I don’t wish for his death; I want to see him tried and put in prison.”
Stroykin, who was born in the Ural region, graduated from the British School of Journalism in the 1990s and went on to hot a Yekaterinburg radio show.
He had been teaching guitar in St. Petersburg for the last decade.
Stroykin is among the latest Putin critics to fall out of a window or die a mysterious death.
Russian ballet dancer, Vladimir Shklyarov — an outspoken critic of the war — mysteriously plunged to his death from the fifth floor of a building last November.
Russian authorities initially labeled the fall an accident, blaming the painkillers he was taking before a complex spinal surgery.
The dancer’s death came after he, too, had lashed out on social media and pubicly declared: “I am against the war in Ukraine.”
