Sergey Nedovodin, St. Petersburg radio founder, dies at 61 after being beaten outside his Moscow home

Sergey Nedovodin, a founder and former executive director of the radio station Ekho Peterburga, has died at 61, the station’s Telegram channel reported.

Nedovodin had been in intensive care and unconscious since late June, the news outlet Rotonda said. He was hospitalized after being beaten in the Moscow region, where he had recently moved. His wife, Anna Shefner, said that on the evening of June 23, Nedovodin went outside after hearing a drunk neighbor loudly discussing something with a friend below his window, and reprimanded them. The neighbor and his friend then beat him. According to Nedovodin’s former colleague Anastasia Mironova, one of the neighbors identified himself as a “participant in the special military operation” — Russia’s term for its war in Ukraine.

“His condition is extremely serious. There are no prognoses at all. He has a bunch of complications: sepsis, a lung abscess. He hasn’t regained consciousness the entire time,” Shefner said of her husband’s condition in early August.

Shefner filed a police report, but as of August 7, no criminal case had been opened over the beating. Mironova, however, claims that a case has since been opened.

Nedovodin helped launch Ekho Peterburga in 1998. In the 2010s, he was a founder, minority shareholder, and executive director of the station and, for a time, also ran its website, according to the independent Telegram channel Astra. He left the station’s management in 2015 after a conflict with the now-shuttered independent Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy. In recent years, Nedovodin headed the research company SMR and the Living Future foundation, which, Rotonda reports, organizes patriotic events and cooperates with Russia’s Defense Ministry.