BELGRADE -- Russian celebrity chef and restaurateur Aleksei Zimin, an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine who ran a restaurant in central London, has been found dead in Belgrade.
The Higher Public Prosecutor's Office in Belgrade told RFE/RL that it was informed by the police about 53-year-old Zimin's death.
"An autopsy has been ordered and a toxicology report to determine the cause of death," the Prosecutor's office said.
RFE/RL learned from sources that the body of a foreign citizen born in 1971 was found on the evening of November 12 without any visible suspicious signs in an apartment in the central Belgrade municipality of Vracar.
In his last Instagram post on November 4, Zimin announced that on November 7 he would prepare a special dinner in a club in Belgrade and present his recently published book, Anglomania, a personal look at the cultural history of Great Britain.
Zimin hosted a cooking show on Russian television channel NTV that was discontinued after he posted anti-war messages on social media following Putin's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
"There will be no new episodes due to the anti-war position of the host. Do I regret it? No, I regret that we ended up going to war. I don't take part in the war, the war takes part in me," he said on Instagram at the time.
In London, Zimin ran the Russian restaurant Zima and published a magazine with the same name.
The restaurant confirmed Zimin's death on Instagram.
"For us, Aleksei was not only a colleague, he was our friend, a close person with whom we were lucky to go through a lot -- both good, kind and sad," the restaurant said.
He had started several restaurants in Moscow and was deputy editor in chief of the gastronomic magazine Afisha and editor in chief of Afisha Food.
He also wrote for the Russian publications Komersant and Vedomosti.