The renowned Russian media executive and political consultant Igor Malashenko has died in Spain at the age of 64, the Kommersant business daily reported on Monday.
Some Russian media reported the death as having been a suicide, citing sources close to Malashenko. No official sources have yet confirmed the reports.
Malashenko was the co-founder and president of NTV, an independent television channel founded by a group of leading journalists, before joining Boris Yeltsin’s campaign team to engineer his presidential victory in 1996. He went on to lead a number of Russian media projects, including the RTVI online television channel and, more recently in 2018, he headed Ksenia Sobchak’s presidential campaign.
“Igor Malashenko has killed himself. I can’t pull myself together,” Sobchak was cited as writing on her Telegram channel Monday by the Vedomosti business daily.
“I’m grateful to him for our joint work on the presidential campaign. I saw him as a very proper and creative person. I’m proud he headed my campaign,” she added.