Anti-Putin Businessman Who Fell To His Death In Washington, D.C. Mocked Russian Army Weeks Before His Alleged Suicide
Sept. 1 2022, Published 2:30 p.m. ET
The anti-Putin businessman found dead outside his apartment building last month reportedly criticized the Russian army weeks before his suspected suicide, RadarOnline.com has learned.
As RadarOnline.com previously reported, 52-year-old Dan Rapoport was found dead outside his Washington, D.C. apartment building on August 14 after allegedly jumping from the roof.
Although the businessman from Moscow was in the United States alone at the time, he was reportedly working to bring his wife and their young daughter over from Ukraine prior to his death.
Now, according to Daily Mail, a podcast featuring Rapoport from June 15 has resurfaced in which the outspoken Vladimir Putin critic mocked the Russian strongman and lambasted the Russian army’s capabilities in fighting Ukraine.
“We all see the poor state of Russian equipment and technology,” Rapoport said during the podcast with Ukrainian journalist Olena Sharpanska. “I doubt anything can even fly from Russia.”
Rapoport also suggested the Russian army was becoming “weaker every day” in their fight against Ukraine.
Later in the recorded interview, the 52-year-old Latvian-born businessman expressed his excitement to bring his wife and daughter over from Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv.
“I left Kyiv in May. I have to arrange my family, so I returned to America,” he told Sharpanska eight weeks before his death. “I spent the first two weeks in Florida, then I went to New York, and now I am in Washington.”
As RadarOnline.com reported, Rapoport’s wife and friends have disagreed with investigators’ claims his death was a suicide.
“I think the circumstances of his death are extremely suspicious,” Bill Browder, a financer who also once lived and worked in Moscow, stated. “Whenever someone who is in a negative view of the Putin regime dies suspiciously, one should rule out foul play, not rule it in.”
“He was a well-known critic of Putin in the West and had been an effective critic,” Browder continued during an interview with Politico. “He was also an open supporter of Alexei Navalny, and he had all these connections in the elite of Washington, D.C.”
After Rapoport’s body was found, the DC Metropolitan Police immediately ruled the businessman’s death a suicide with no foul play suspected in the case.