Alexei Dolgikh: Hundreds of Speeding Fines, Then a Fatal Lamborghini Crash

At about 1:30 in the morning on 9 November 2025, a car caught fire on Moscow's Mezhdunarodnoye Highway, the road that runs out to Sheremetyevo airport. A Lamborghini Urus, an Italian sport utility vehicle built to go faster than most sports cars, had hit a roadside barrier on the slip road towards Leningradskoye Highway, flipped over and burst into flames. Footage that circulated the same day showed the car rolling and catching fire, with banknotes scattered across the road.

Four people were inside. The driver and owner, Alexei Dolgikh, 36, a businessman known in Moscow for dealing in cryptocurrency, died at the scene. So did one of his passengers, a friend. The two others, young men in their early twenties, were taken to hospital with multiple fractures. The Moscow prosecutor's office confirmed two dead and two injured, said the car had hit an obstacle, overturned and caught fire, and released photographs of the wreck. The prosecutor's office for Moscow's Northern district said it was overseeing the inquiry.

The car and the fines

Dolgikh had bought the Urus in August 2024 for about 35 million roubles, roughly $390,000 at the time. In the fifteen months that followed, according to Shot, a Russian Telegram news channel widely described as close to the security services, the car collected 586 recorded traffic violations, with fines adding up to more than 1.1 million roubles. Most were for speeding. Others were for crossing road markings, skipping payment on toll roads and not wearing a seatbelt. Other outlets counted the fines differently, from more than 200 to more than 400, but every count runs into the hundreds.

How fast he was going when he crashed is not settled. Shot reported about 100 km/h, roughly 62 mph. Some reports put it nearer 150 km/h, about 93 mph. No official figure was published, and no report put it anywhere near 200 mph.

The car had made the news once before. On the evening of 1 September 2024, a quarrel on the veranda of the Aist restaurant at Patriarch's Ponds, one of Moscow's most expensive neighbourhoods, ended with shots fired. Russian media reported that the people involved fled in Dolgikh's Lamborghini, and police put the car on a wanted list. Dolgikh went to the police himself. He said he had been at the restaurant, had told a group of young men to stop throwing water at a woman, and had left before the shooting began. He was not charged.

The crypto businessman

Dolgikh was not a founder of a famous coin or a big exchange. Russian media described him as a crypto businessman whose company acted as a go-between in cryptocurrency deals: arranging trades between buyers and sellers privately, outside any public exchange, much as a broker might arrange a large block of shares away from the stock market floor. That kind of business has grown in Russia since Western sanctions cut many Russian banks off from international payments, and it draws attention from banks and regulators because the same service that helps a legitimate company move money can help someone launder it.

Some Russian outlets reported that Dolgikh had once been suspected of money laundering and that several Russian banks had refused to serve him. None of those claims was tested in court, and no charge against him has been reported. English-language crypto media picked up the crash within a day, under headlines about a crypto millionaire and a burning Lamborghini. How much he was actually worth was never published.

What is known now

Police said Dolgikh was driving. Early reports pointed to speed as the main cause. No public report of a mechanical fault, a third vehicle or any deliberate act has emerged, and nothing in the record suggests the crash was anything other than a road accident. Some commentary at the time bundled Dolgikh with other sudden deaths of people in crypto; no evidence connects his death to anyone else's.

More than eleven months later, no final finding by the investigators has been published. The record that remains is a burned-out car on a highway slip road, two families in mourning, two young men with broken bones, and a list of traffic violations that ran to several hundred lines before the last one.