A man who helped run one of Moscow’s busiest private jet terminals is dead, and the timing has a lot of people outside Russia asking questions. Alexey Korshenko, 57, was found hanged on the balcony of his Moscow apartment on June 6. Russian investigators are calling it a suspected suicide. What makes this more than a sad local story is where Korshenko used to work. His terminal serviced Yevgeny Prigozhin’s business jet before it fell out of the sky in 2023 and killed everyone on board.
The name barely registered when a Moscow newspaper first mentioned a terminal boss’s death back in June. The paper did not print his name, and the story slipped by almost unnoticed. Then a Telegram channel known for leaking security service gossip put a name to the body, and suddenly the whole thing looked very different.
Who Alexey Korshenko actually was
Korshenko was not some random baggage manager. He helped build Sheremetyevo Airport’s business aviation terminal from scratch when it opened in 2011, and he ran operations there for more than a decade. This is the fancy part of the airport, the section where private jets land and take off and where the passengers never touch a normal check-in line. He knew the building, the crews, and the paperwork better than almost anyone alive.
Later he moved into a bigger role as deputy general director at a company called Avia Group, which manages the VIP terminals at both Sheremetyevo in Moscow and Pulkovo in St. Petersburg. According to business records, Avia Group cleared a net profit of 506 million rubles in 2025. The company also owns a helipad on Valaam Island, a spot Vladimir Putin is known to visit on a regular basis. So this was a man deep inside the plumbing of how Russia’s powerful people move around.
The Prigozhin plane crash that started it all
To understand why anyone cares about a terminal director in Moscow, you have to go back to August 23, 2023. That was the day Yevgeny Prigozhin, the loudmouth boss of the Wagner mercenary group, boarded an Embraer Legacy 600 business jet. The plane took off and crashed in the Tver region north of Moscow shortly after leaving the ground. All 10 people on board died, including Prigozhin and several of his top commanders.
The crash happened exactly two months after Prigozhin pulled off a short-lived armed mutiny against Russia’s military leadership. His fighters rolled toward Moscow, then turned back. A lot of people figured his days were numbered the moment that convoy stopped. When the jet went down almost to the day, two months later, very few people believed it was mechanical bad luck. The terminal that prepped that plane was Korshenko’s terminal.
The turbo-cooler and the part that was swapped
Here is the detail that turns a suspected suicide into a story. During pre-flight checks on Prigozhin’s jet, technicians reportedly found two mechanical faults, one of them a failing turbo-cooler unit. A replacement part was ordered from the United States, but when it arrived it was described as damaged. So a local Russian firm stepped in and supplied a different unit instead.
According to intelligence sources, that replacement unit may have had an explosive device hidden inside it. The firm that supplied the part, named Protector, is reportedly linked through its owner to figures connected to organized crime and to networks that sit close to Russian intelligence. None of this has been proven in a court, and the claim about the explosive has not been independently verified. But if you were looking for the one person who would know the paper trail on that swapped part, you would be looking at the man who ran the terminal.
The morning of the flight got strange
On the day the jet departed, representatives from a separate aviation company showed up and inspected Prigozhin’s plane. Their stated reason was that they were thinking about buying it. That is an odd thing to happen hours before a plane blows up, and observers have flagged it ever since.
After the crash, Russian transport security officials were sent to the terminal to inspect it. They were reportedly denied access to the security camera footage, the inspection equipment, and the maintenance paperwork. FSB officers, the folks who run Russia’s main security service, are said to have grabbed the aircraft’s inspection report and walked off with it. When the country’s own security service blocks its own transport investigators from watching the tape, people notice. That refusal to hand over the footage is one of the biggest reasons analysts outside Russia never bought the official story.
The official cause nobody outside Russia believes
Russia’s Investigative Committee wrapped up its inquiry and landed on a strange conclusion. It said hand grenades detonated inside the cabin. Not a missile, not a bomb built into the plane, but grenades going off mid-flight. Western governments and independent aviation analysts have openly disputed that finding.
A very different account came from Western and Russian intelligence sources who spoke to The Wall Street Journal. They said the jet was deliberately destroyed and that the operation was directed by Nikolai Patrushev, the former secretary of Russia’s Security Council and one of the most feared power players in the country. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied any involvement in Prigozhin’s death. Putin himself made a point of publicly praising Prigozhin as a talented man who made mistakes, which is not exactly the eulogy of a grieving friend.
Fired three weeks before he died
One piece of this keeps jumping out at former colleagues. Korshenko was abruptly dismissed from his job roughly three weeks before his death. No public reason was given. The people who worked with him told Russian journalists the firing caught them off guard, because he had been a fixture at the operation for years and there was no obvious falling out.
A man with more than a decade of institutional knowledge gets quietly pushed out, and three weeks later he is found hanged on his own balcony. Authorities have not said his death is connected to the 2023 crash. There is no public evidence he was ever questioned about it or named in any investigation. But the sequence, the sudden dismissal followed so closely by the death, is exactly the kind of pattern that makes outsiders uneasy.
Two dozen dead executives and counting
Korshenko’s death does not sit alone. Since the start of 2022, more than two dozen top executives at major Russian companies have died under circumstances that raised eyebrows. The list includes people tied to Gazprom, Novatek, Lukoil, and the tech firm VK. Some fell from windows. Some were found dead alongside family members. Some, like Korshenko, were ruled suicides.
Any one of those deaths could be explained on its own. Stress, money trouble, private pain. Stacked together, they form a grim run that has become a dark running joke and a serious concern for people who study Russia. When you spend your career near the country’s energy giants or its security apparatus, an open window starts to look like an occupational hazard.
Why this one is hard to shake
The whole story rests on reporting from a Telegram channel called VChK-OGPU, which trades in leaks from inside Russian law enforcement. It named Korshenko, and it alleged, without hard proof, that he may have known details about how the plane was prepared for its final flight. That is a big claim built on anonymous sourcing, and it deserves the skepticism that comes with it.
Still, the pieces that are on the record are enough to keep the questions alive. A man helped build the terminal. The terminal serviced the doomed jet. A part was swapped in from a company with murky ties. The security footage vanished into FSB hands. The man got fired for no stated reason, then died. As one analysis of the case put it, the death adds another layer to a crash that was already one of the murkiest events of the decade.
Nobody outside a small circle in Moscow knows what actually happened to Alexey Korshenko, and given how the last inquiry into that terminal went, it is fair to wonder if anyone ever will. What is certain is that a man who could have answered real questions about Prigozhin’s plane is no longer around to answer them.
