A funeral for previous Transportation Minister Roman Starovoit was kept in St.
Petersburg on Friday, days after he died in an evident suicide outside Moscow following his surprise dismissal by President Vladimir Putin.Leningrad area Governor Alexander Drozdenko, along with other federal and regional authorities who had dealt with Starovoit for many years, went to the morning ceremony, according to the local news outlet Fontanka.Video released by the Kommersant service paper showed a small crowd gathered at Smolensky Cemetery on the citysVasilyevsky Island, where a hearse flanked by four pallbearers waited to bring the ex-minister to his burial site.Fontanka reported that Starovoit was buried near the Chapel of St.
Ksenia, a location of the historic cemetery scheduled by authorities for cultural and government figures.Born in the city of Kursk 53 years ago, Starovoit invested much of his youth in the Leningrad region.His funeral happened one day after a funeral in Moscow, which numerous senior Kremlin officials participated in.
Putin did not attend but sent a wreath, according to the Kremlin.Starovoit was found dead with a gunshot wound near a parking lot beyond Moscow on Monday, simply hours after the Russian president dismissed him without description.
Cops private investigators are treating the case as a believed suicide.Starovoit had actually apparently left a two-word farewell message in a Transportation Ministry work chat before his death, stating It was an honor, Kommersantreported Thursday, mentioning an unnamed deputy of the ex-minister.
The late authorities was dismissed over a year after being selected transport minister.
Before that consultation, he served as the governor of the southwestern Kursk region from 2018 to May 2024.
Starovoitsremoval and subsequent death have fueled speculation that he might have been facing prosecution as part of an ongoing examination into supposed corruption in the building of border defenses in the Kursk region, which saw a major Ukrainian incursion last August.While he had not been formally implicated in that examination, Russian media mentioned unnamed sources as saying that suspects in the event, including his predecessor in the Kursk area, Alexei Smirnov, had actually just recently testified against him.