Russian energy tycoon has died in mysterious circumstances, bringing the total of deaths among Putin’s high-profile allies to nine.Wealthy politician Nikolay Petrunin – formerly a top gas industry executive, known as Russia's 'gas wonderkid' – reportedly died from complications linked to severe Covid, and had been in a coma for a month..Petrunin, 47, was deputy chairman of the Russian parliament’s powerful energy committee, and a Putin loyalist and “political prodigy”.READ MORE: High-profile Russians keep mysteriously 'falling' to their deaths from windowsHis businesses built gas pipelines for major Russian energy operators and he had links to Kremlin gas behemoth Gazprom - now starving the West of Russian supplies over the war - and Rosneft.He had been an MP in the Tula region since 2016, and was married to Albina Petrunina, a former policewoman holding the rank of major and they had three children together.This week it also emerged that a leading judge, Sergey Maslov, 42, was killed at or near the epicentre of the Crimean Bridge blast.He had overseen cases involving energy giant Gazprom and the Moscow city government at Moscow Arbitration Court.There has been a spate of mysterious deaths associated with Gazprom and energy companies since the start of the war in Ukraine.On September 1, oil tycoon Ravil Maganov, 67, fell to his death from the sixth floor window of a Moscow hospital. One report says the chairman of Lukoil – Russia’s second largest oil company – was “beaten” before he was “thrown out of a window”, however this was not confirmed officially.
