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The blast on the top floor ripped through the nine-story building in the city of Shakhty, not far from the Ukrainian border, before dawn on Monday.

The Emergency Situations Ministry said that the blast ripped through an apartment building in the city of Shakhty on Monday morning.

The town of Shakhty is less than an hour's drive from Russia's border with Ukraine.

While reigning as the Olympic super heavyweight champion, he earned a handsome salary as a mining engineer in Shakhty, located in a coal-mining area, but the government afforded him plenty of time to train.

Alekseyev had settled in Shakhty in the mid-1960s with his wife, Olimpiada, and their sons, Sergei and Dmitri.