In the wild 1990s after the Soviet Union's collapse, Gavriil Frolov was a prominent figure on the rave scene in St. Petersburg. Then he became a monk. Now, he's at the center of a deal that handed the state natural-gas giant Gazprom a massive ice hockey arena in President Vladimir Putin's hometown, RFE/RL has found.
Five years ago, RFE/RL's Russian Service examined the snaking career path of Frolov -- formerly known as Viktor Frolov -- from monk to property developer and, apparently, son-in-law of sanctioned oil-trade tycoon and ice hockey executive Gennady Timchenko, a longtime Putin associate.
Now, a new investigation by the Russian Service and Systema, RFE/RL's Russian investigative unit, reveals Frolov's past as a raver and ties him to the recent acquisition of SKA-Arena, which claims to be the world's biggest ice hockey venue by seating capacity, by Gazprom.
Gavriil Frolov, a.k.a. Viktor Frolov
The deal was announced this month at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, once Putin's annual showcase for foreign investment. Now it's a more modest event, its scope diminished by Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which has sparked a slew of Western sanctions and a fierce fightback by Kyiv. This year, Ukraine menaced the June 3-6 meeting with dramatic drone strikes on nearby oil facilities.
On June 5, the day Putin delivered the keynote speech at the forum, the ice hockey club SKA St. Petersburg -- SKA stands for Army Sports Club, an echo of the Soviet era, when teams were affiliated with military branches and other state organizations -- said it was "announcing with joy" that the team had "acquired its own home" for the first time in its 80-year existence.
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Marina SalyeThe social media statement said that the club, which is owned by Gazprom, had acquired 100 percent of the charter capital of the company that owns the arena. It gave gushing credit to Gazprom CEO Aleksei Miller, another longtime Putin associate. Miller served under Putin in 1991-96, when the latter was head of the External Relations Committee at the St. Petersburg mayor's office.
SKA is scheduled to play a charity match at the arena in July and play home games there in the 2026-27 season, which starts in September. For the time being, at least, it will share the venue with the Shanghai Dragons, a Chinese team in the Russian-led Kontinental Hockey League that has been playing there since 2025 after moving up from the Moscow region. It hasn't been based in China since 2020.
Ballooning Budget
Since its conception almost a decade ago in 2017, the arena project has reflected some of the qualities of many big developments in Russia, from cost overruns and corruption suspicions to construction delays and murky deals.
In 2020, drone footage of the demolition of the existing sports complex on the site captured the moment when part of a roof and wall collapsed, crushing a 29-year-old worker to death.
The arena was supposed to host the Ice Hockey World Championship in 2023, but Russia was stripped of its right to hold the event after Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
By the time it was finished, the project's budget ballooned an initial estimate of roughly $525 million to more than $1 billion.
The SKA-Arena construction site in St. Petersburg, December 2021
The opening of the arena, originally scheduled for October 2022, was delayed until late 2023, and construction was not fully completed until this year. A fire broke out less than a year after the opening, and SKA soon announced it would not use the arena in the 2025-26 season. No reason was cited, but media outlets cited poor transport links and what one report said was the high cost of holding games there.
The announcement that the SKA club now owns the SKA arena included no details about the price or any other aspect of the transaction. But registry documents and financial reports examined by Systema and RFE/RL's Russian Service show that before the transfer, the company controlling the arena, Sports Technology and Investments (STII), was 100 percent owned by a man named Mikhail Frolov.
Mikhail Frolov is unknown to the Russian public. His brother Gavriil, at times, has had a measure of fame: In the early 1990s, he was a prominent figure on the rave scene in St. Petersburg, which was called Leningrad until a referendum in 1991, the year the Soviet Union fell apart. In those days, he went by Viktor, but Systema and RFE/RL's Russian Service have determined through facial recognition software and other evidence that Viktor and Gavriil Frolov are the same person.
The 18-Year Gap
One of the last public traces of Viktor Frolov is a database entry from 1996 that shows him registering as a resident of a village in the Kaluga region, southwest of Moscow, that is home to a monastery. It would be 18 years before he returned to temporal life again, now as Gavriil -- the name he had also used as a monk.
In 2014, Frolov became the director of Akantus, a St. Petersburg company that makes iconostases and other furnishings for churches and monasteries and was founded, corporate records show, by Natalia Browning, a daughter of Timchenko and his wife, Yelena.
And no later than 2014, Frolov apparently married Browning, who left the company in 2016 – the year Frolov became its owner, a role that later shifted to his brother Mikhail. RFE/RL has not determined whether Frolov and Browning were legally wedded, but it has found multiple pieces of evidence that they have travelled together and have a child together.
In January 2024, according to photographs and other materials, Frolov helped escort Putin and Belarusian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko on a tour of SKA-Arena.
Frolov had become the director of the Gorka group of companies, which RFE/RL determined was awarded the contract to demolish the old Petersburg sports and concert venue and build SKA-Arena in its place.
Gorka managed its construction until 2023, when Timchenko sued the company's co-owner, Vladimir Lavlentsev, over a multibillion-ruble debt. Lavlenstev was arrested, convicted of embezzlement, and sentenced to 13 years in prison, and Gorka was declared bankrupt in December 2024.
Gennady Timchenko (left) and Putin (in uniform) at an amateur ice hockey match in Sochi, Russia, May 2017
The arena project was taken over by an affiliate of Stroitransgaz, which has also been linked to Timchenko. Company records show it received nearly 70 billion rubles ($940 million) for work on the arena, including 66 billion rubles from STII, the firm owned by Gavriil Frolov's brother Mikhail.
Financial reports from SKA-Arena indicate that before it was sold to the Gazprom affiliate that owns the team, STII invested an additional 88.4 billion rubles ($1.18 billion) in the project, which is almost the exact amount of debt that STII had. In 2024, STII transferred its total debt at the time, 80.1 billion rubles, to a company called Proton Finance.
Proton Finance, with just one employee, was registered that same year in an office complex on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. Its owner is not identified, but information from legal databases point to a connection with Timchenko: The founder and sole employee received his salary from a company linked to the tycoon.
In the wake of Gorka's bankruptcy, meanwhile, Gavriil Frolov remained the owner of two furniture workshops, one of which, Akantus, has been owned at various times by him, his brother Mikhail, and Natalia Browning. Financial records indicate that in addition to its work on church furnishings, it was a subcontractor on the SKA-Arena project.
According to leaked documents, Gavriil Frolov had more than 500 million rubles ($6.7 million) in an account at Gazprombank. The records also indicate that between December 2019 and July 2024, Frolov spent a total of 12.5 million rubles ($168,000) on purchases at TsUM, a Soviet-era Moscow department store now known for its luxury shops.
Neither Gavriil nor Mikhail Frolov responded to requests for comment from Systema and RFE/RL's Russian Service.